Black Hole Sun

Won’t you come, and wash the rain away? For those in California and around the world laboring under a deluge from the sky, perhaps this video from the frontiers of astroseismology will be entertaining and informative, if not comforting.

The short version is that it’s not implausible for a microscopic black hole to enter the sun, start consuming material and producing back-pressure against the massive gravity. As you can imagine, its growth eventually alters the life cycle of the star, but perhaps more subtly than you’d think.

And, back in the context of SETI and general cosmology, while we’re pretty sure our Sun doesn’t (yet) have one, it is encouraging to think that we can place constraints on the number of primordial black holes there are flying around out there, as well as confirm or rule out some dark matter theories.