28
Filling the Solar System with AIR - What would happen?
(hackertalks.com)
There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca still apply!
Thanks for reading all of this, even if you didn't read all of this, and your eye started somewhere else, have a watermelon slice ๐.
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.