"steve mememe" wrote in message
...
The people in this discussion group are obviously very smart so I would
like to ask a question I can never get a straight answer for. Is there a
limit to the size/power a Black Hole can be? It's just a point of
curiosity to me.

I'm interested in what you mean by the 'power' of a black hole. At anything
other than close distances a black hole has exactly the same gravitational
effect as any other object, so if the Sun was somehow converted into a black
hole, the rest of the solar system would continue to orbit it in exactly the
same way. The black hole doesn't 'suck matter into it' any more than the sun
'sucks the planets into it' now.


Despite what another contributor to this thread has suggested, there is good
evidence for Black Holes.
For example, part of the evidence for a supermassive Black Hole at the
centre of the galaxy is the observed movement under gravity of a star with
an orbit radius of about 120 AU (appx 10 times that of Saturn) and period of
about 15 years (about 1/2 that of Saturn). This implies a central mass
equivalent to 3-4 million Suns at the centre of the galaxy.