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Could a black hole devour us all one day?
There are millions of them out there
just waiting.
And, if we happened to make
a black hole accidentally,
well, you better fasten your seatbelts.
Things are really going to suck.
Literally.
Just 3,000 light-years from Earth
is a black hole visible to the naked eye.
Thankfully, we are a safe distance
from this stellar black hole
and many others like it.
There are approximately 100 million of them
out there in our Galaxy
that we know of.
They are remnants of supernovae,
which occur when stars 10 to 20 times larger
than our Sun
collapse in on themselves.
Stellar black holes are fairly common
and are about 16 km (10 mi) in diameter.
And then there's the much larger competition,
supermassive black holes.
These have a diameter
roughly the size of our Solar System
and a mass greater than
one million suns combined.
One of them, known as Sagittarius A*,
is right smack dab in the middle of our Galaxy.
Technically, a black hole
the size of a 1 mm (1/25 in) pin
could destroy us if it was close enough to Earth
due to its incredibly dense mass
and extreme gravitational pull.
Our survival all depends on
whether we've surpassed
the event horizon or not.
You can think of this
as the black hole's point of no return.
Anything beyond this point
would have to travel
faster than light to escape.
Good luck with that.
If Earth got close enough,
the side nearest to the black hole
would begin stretching toward it.
Our atmosphere would start to be vacuumed up.
And then huge chunks of the Earth
would rip apart and follow suit.
If Earth managed to fall into the orbit
of the black hole,
we'd experience tidal heating.
The strong uneven gravitational pull
on Earth
would continuously deform the planet.
This would generate a tremendous amount
of internal friction,
heating the Earth's core to disastrous levels.
It would likely give rise to earthquakes,
volcanoes,
and deadly tsunamis.
The trifecta of doom.
Eventually, Earth would begin to stretch
in a process known as
And, not in the tasty cheesy, tomatoey way.
Let's say you were a superhero
and decided to fight the black hole headfirst.
Well, your arms would be closer than your feet,
causing your body to stretch out vertically
and become more and more compressed.
Let's hope your superpower is elasticity.
For an average-sized stellar black hole,
spaghettification could occur
several hundred kilometers away
from the event horizon.
But for a supermassive black hole,
physicists believe that this would happen
inside the event horizon due to its size.
Eventually, no matter what size it is,
anything entering a black hole
would be ripped into a string
of individual atoms.
This would happen to anything that crosses it.
People, planets, stars, you name it.
Unfortunately,
our whole Solar System would be doomed.
The careful balance of the Sun
and our many planets would collapse,
which could send them crashing
into one another.
And, to add insult to injury,
our asteroid belt would get sucked toward us.
About 200 of the 552,894 asteroids we know of
are more than 100 km (62 mi) across.
So, if one hits us,
we'd be dead
before we would turn into spaghetti.
Frankly, I'm not sure which fate would be worse.
All of the matter in our Solar System
would join the accretion disk
around the black hole.
As matter gets sucked into the black hole,
it generates massive amounts of radiation.
So, even if we somehow
survived all the asteroids,
we'd likely die from the radiation.
Believe it or not,
astronomers have discovered
rare circumbinary planets
that orbit two stars.
While this may be
a possibility with a black hole and our Sun,
the extreme tidal forces
would most likely make our planet uninhabitable.
And worse yet,
we might get kicked out of orbit
or swallowed by the Sun
or the black hole eventually.
I'm sorry, but there's not an outcome
where we win here.
But, and this is a big but,
maybe we could find a way to protect ourselves
in some hyper-reinforced space shuttle.
If we somehow made it past the event horizon,
we might be in for an even stranger time.
Physics as we know it would change.
Things like gravity, the speed of light,
and even how atoms bind and react
may be completely different.
The truth is,
we don't know what would happen.
We can't get any information
out of a black hole.
Would we get pulled into another dimension?
End up in a parallel universe?
Or maybe we're already inside a black hole.
What we do know, however, is that
that's a story for another What If.
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