Could Earth be swallowed by a black hole? (2024)

FAQs

Could Earth be swallowed by a black hole? ›

Despite their abundance, there is no reason to panic: black holes will not devour Earth nor the Universe. It is incredibly unlikely Earth would fall into a black hole because, at a distance, their gravitational pull is no more compelling than a star of the same mass.

The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an asteroid, it'd pass straight through the entire Earth and exit the other side.

Within any black hole is the central point, the singularity, which has infinite gravity and where mass is compressed into an infinitely small point. There, it is game over. There's no surviving. And therefore the idea of traveling through time and space, via black hole or wormhole, don't really register in reality.

For something to have an actual effect on us, it would have to be certainly no farther than a light year away. If we're talking about sort of a normal black hole that we we talk about when a star explodes and the core collapses, and it forms what we call a stellar mass black hole, it would have to be pretty close.

You'd be torn apart. A black hole the size of even the smallest atom (around 0.03 nanometre radius) would have a mass of 2\times10^{16} kg. At a distance of, say, 3 metres, it would produce an acceleration of much more than 100,000 newtons per kilogram, or 10,000 times Earth's surface gravity.

When matter falls into or comes closer than the event horizon of a black hole, it becomes isolated from the rest of space-time. It can never leave that region. For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe.

White holes are the opposite of black holes, in that they spit out light and matter, rather than trapping it. So far, white holes are purely hypothetical objects, but astronomers are contemplating how they could form in reality.

The fate of anyone falling into a black hole would be a painful “spaghettification,” an idea popularized by Stephen Hawking in his book “A Brief History of Time.” In spaghettification, the intense gravity of the black hole would pull you apart, separating your bones, muscles, sinews and even molecules.

Either way, spaghettification leads to a painful conclusion. When the tidal forces exceed the elastic limits of your body, you'll snap apart at the weakest point, probably just above the hips.

Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date. A negative mass wormhole might be spotted by the way its gravity affects light that passes by.

Why won't our sun become a black hole? ›

Stars like the Sun just aren't massive enough to become black holes. Instead, in several billion years, the Sun will cast off its outer layers, and its core will form a white dwarf - a dense ball of carbon and oxygen that no longer produces nuclear energy, but that shines because it is very hot.

Given how many black holes we expect are out there and how long our Solar System has been around, that's only about a ~0.000000001% chance, or 1-in-100 billion, that any planet would encounter a black hole over the past 4.5 billion years.

Well, due to the intense gravitational forces within, time would be speeded up for you – so it would be over in a matter of milliseconds.

If the Sun was replaced with a black hole that had the same mass as the Sun, the Schwarzschild radius would be 3 km (compared to the Sun's radius of nearly 700,000 km). Hence the Earth would have to get very close to get sucked into a black hole at the center of our Solar System.

If it was to hover on Earth's surface, its gravitational pull would cover a third of the planet, tearing it up at 12 kilometres per second. Mr Aly wrote on Q&A site Quora: “Assuming the black hole appears on the earth surface, its sphere of influence would have a radius of about a third of the earth radius.

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very large ball that could hold a few million Earths.

D Astrophysics, University of Leicester, said a 1mm black hole would still have a mass of 10 percent that of Earth. If it was to hover on Earth's surface, its gravitational pull would cover a third of the planet, tearing it up at 12 kilometres per second.

Spaghettification: A black hole would stretch an astronaut's body into a thin ribbon, since the gravity pulling on their feet is so much stronger than on their head. One-way door: A black hole's event horizon is the “point of no return”. Nothing can escape from within, not even light.

They simply evaporate away. Black holes, when they are not actively feeding, lose mass and energy as radiation: Hawking radiation. Black holes are black because nothing, not even light, can escape them. Once something crosses its boundary, the event horizon, it's gone for good.