this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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Does this mean if we had a huge empty sphere in space, not around a star, (empty Dyson sphere) it could form a black hole with all the mass at the outside edge of the sphere?
So, something becomes a black hole when there's too much mass in too small a space.
For a given amount of mass, that's the Schwarzschild radius:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
A Dyson sphere would need to avoid collapsing its matter into something smaller than the Schwarzschild radius; if it did, then it would become a black hole. If they don't collapse, then no.
I don't know how Dyson spheres are supposed to avoid gravitational collapse.
goes looking
Okay. Looks like what they do is to basically consist of a bunch of solid satellites that are in orbit but don't collide. They aren't actually a single solid object; the name is something of a misnomer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/zqg6e/is_a_dyson_sphere_actually_possible_or_would_it/
But a solar-system-sized sphere of gas can't do that, because you can't keep the orbits of the gas from smacking into each other.