Does an X amount of space have a maximum mass?

I think there would have to be a maximum mass, at least under normal circumstances. The length of atomic orbitals is set, so technically you can only fit so much stuff into one space until it start reacting, fusing and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

I would think not, considering black holes are incredibly massive, yet only occupy a singularity.

@Chambz Ooh, that’s actually a good point. Do we know how big black holes actually are?

Actually, all the mass of the universe once occupied a singularity, but space goes all wonky under the incredibly high gravitational conditions we’re talking about.

On the black hole mass, it depends on if you count from the event horizon (at which point black holes get less dense with increased mass) or the singularity (which is a point)

Outside of a black hole, you’re looking at a Quark Star as the densest thing possible. A neutron star (which I was able to find mass for) weighs 5.9×10^7 kg/m^3 and a Quark star is denser.

By comparison, one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh 2,908,000,000 metric tons

@grumpyfish So, if a Quark Star is the densest thing possible, then there is a limit to how much density an object can have? Or is that the highest density until the effects of gravity start to mangle spacetime?

E = m * c^2

A star the size of our sun will eventually collapse under gravitational forces to the size of a marble. It keeps getting squeezed and then too much ! ... it goes supernova like the birth of a miniature universe. So it is the compaction of the mass to a certain dimension before explosive implosion. Even larger stars that our very small-average sun, when they collapse may NOT exposively implode but implode to the size of ??? and blink out into a black hole….. usually spinning very rapidly and radiating massive narrow jets of energy along the rotational axis. There is no known limit to the size of a black hole. Neutron stars are collapsed stars, as well, very rapidly spinning, but relatively stable as such.

@gggritso Outside of a black hole, under the normal physics constants we know and love, a Quark star is likely the most massive macroscopic thing possible. That is, you can measure teaspoons of quark star.

You could say that a gluon or something is the most massive per volume area thing, but that’s more of a corner case—it IS something that has mass and is very small, but it would be hard to get a bunch of them together.

When you start looking at things like the conditions immediately surrounding the big bang, etc, you start to bend the physical constants, and things like “density” and such get really weird.

In terms of “normal space-time” and “macro objects” a quark star is the densest thing currently proposed, outside of a black hole.

The problem with a black hole is that if you count the singularity, you have to divide by zero. To quote: “The singularity of a non-rotating black hole has zero length, width, and height; a rotating black hole is smeared out to form a ring shape lying in the plane of rotation.[40] The ring still has no thickness and hence no volume.” (Wikipedia).

However: “The average density of a supermassive black hole (measured as the mass of the black hole divided by its Schwarzschild volume) can be very low, and may actually be lower than the density of air. This is because the Schwarzschild radius is directly proportional to mass, while density is inversely proportional to the volume. Since the volume of a spherical object (such as the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole) is directly proportional to the cube of the radius, and mass merely increases linearly, the volume increases at a greater rate than mass. Thus, average density decreases for increasingly larger radii of black holes (due to volume increasing much faster than mass).” (more wikipedia)

@virtualist I was under the impression that our sun is to small to go supernova; that it will instead become a white dwarf. Considerably bigger than a marble.

@oratio Right ! It throws off a lot of mass in red giant phase but is not supernova.We’re still toast in ~5e9 y.

No, definitely not. If you are using two 5m^3 spaces and had one filled with salt and the other with Gold, the second container would have much more mass for the same space the salt took up.

@LeopardGecko True, however if I fill that 5m^3 space with neutrons, can you fill it with something heavier?

If you were to fully saturate the box with neutrons than I don’t believe you could fit anything more into it without exploding the box.

@LeopardGecko Right! So X amount of space does have a maximum mass, yes?