– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

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.