what's the new icon & how do i appropriately thirst for it..
still a quasistar, just a more realistic depiction of one! i may end up going for a more 'schematic' view that depicts the black hole more visibly later.
consider the following angles for being horny about quasistars- there are others, but these ones come to mind first:
first, of course, the erotic appeal of a black hole. once you pass the event horizon, space only flows in one direction. to you, the universe outside is pretty lights- you cannot go back again. forward in time is the same as forward in space, and the only way forward is inward. down, down, down; slow as you like, but always down.
a quasistar is a large black hole cocooned in an amount of star-matter that rivals small galaxies, powered by the light that shines from all of the matter in the accretion disk colliding. she cannot devour it fast enough, and her sheer desire outshines galaxies.
a quasistar is exceedingly large, larger than any star in the history of the universe. the largest are so wide that even if entirely unimpeded, light from the core would take a full month to escape its bulk; the solar system entire is barely noticeable. they are so massive that early in their lifespans, the supermassive black holes at their hearts are still a tiny percentage of their mass.
a quasistar is a revenant supermassive star, made so massive that even the power of unimpeded hydrogen fusion cannot fight gravity. the core collapses into a black hole with no need for a supernova, and becomes vampiric. it swallows not just the vast clouds around it, but also its former kin- it is so much larger than other supermassive stars that they can vanish into its bulk nearly unnoticed.
the internals of a quasistar are alien- much of it is forced into constant motion by the pull of the black hole, made to transfer heat at the highest possible rate. the black hole forces the interior of what was once a star to serve only it, so it can grow to devour as much as possible.
a quasistar is, despite it all, delicate. instability is easy for such a massive and complex body, and many arrangements of its mass and luminosity cause it to throw off massive portions of itself. if strong enough, these winds can counteract its constant accretion entirely and force its entire body to either collapse into the black hole or be dispersed in a tenth the time it would normally take.
quasistars were ubiquitous in the early universe. each one was at the center of a vast accretion disk, independent from that of the black hole, which fed into it at rates of over the entire mass of the sun per year. each one was most likely part of a cluster of other stars, supermassive and not, and grew to devour them. when the quasistar died, the supermassive black hole at its heart was revealed- and around it were other black holes, young stars, and most importantly that vast accretion disk. quasistars were the seeds of galaxies- in a very real sense, a galaxy is simply the final stage of a quasistar's accretion disk.
