Answer: Black holes don't really “explode”, which implies that they generate a large outburst of energy which ultimately tears them apart, but they do have outbursts (also, unfortunately, referred to as “explosions”).
Superhot particles ejected from the black hole would slam into our planet along with lethal levels of radiation. Once the x-ray and gamma-ray photons reach Earth, they would destroy the ozone layer within months.
The most common way that black holes cause explosions is not through their own self-destruction, but through the sheer power of their overwhelming gravitational force. Supermassive black holes sit in the centers of galaxies, and sometimes large clumps of matter, such as stars, pass too close.
This energy takes the form of a slow-but-steady stream of radiation and particles that came to be known as Hawking radiation. With every bit of energy that escapes, the black hole loses mass and thereby shrinks, eventually popping out of existence altogether.
At the center of our galaxy, a supermassive black hole churns. Learn about the types of black holes, how they form, and how scientists discovered these invisible, yet extraordinary objects in our universe. In their final stages, enormous stars go out with a bang in massive explosions known as supernovae.
According to our best theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, your spaghettified body would eventually end up at a 'singularity' – an infinitely small and dense point at the 'bottom' of the black hole.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole.
The most powerful supernova yet recorded (ASSASN-15lh) was 22 trillion times more explosive than a black hole will be in its final moments. It doesn't matter how small or how massive a black hole is, their closing fireworks are exactly the same. The only difference is how long it will take a black hole to explode.
If you leapt heroically into a stellar-mass black hole, your body would be subjected to a process called 'spaghettification' (no, really, it is). The black hole's gravity force would compress you from top to toe, while stretching you at the same time… thus, spaghetti.
Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity. As the singularity accumulates more and more matter, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases proportionally.
Located just under 1,600 light-years away, the discovery suggests there might be a sizable population of dormant black holes in binary systems. The black hole Gaia BH1, seen in this artist's concept near its Sun-like companion star, is the closest black hole to Earth discovered so far.
Earth is facing no threat because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for our planet. According to NASA, even if a black hole the same mass as the sun replace the sun, Earth still would not fall in.
Despite their abundance, there is no reason to panic: black holes will not devour Earth nor the Universe. It is incredibly unlikely that Earth would ever fall into a black hole. This is because, at a distance, their gravitational pull is no more compelling than a star of the same mass.
Black holes are dark, dense regions in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Not even light can get out of these regions. That is why we cannot see black holes—they are invisible to our eyes. Because nothing can get out of black holes, physicists struggle understanding these objects.
One hour for a black hole observer would equate to 100,000,000 years for a person on Earth. Therefore one minute in a black hole would be roughly 1,700,000 years.
Human beings don't stand a chance. But before you go worrying over what it might feel like to be sucked into the gaping maw of a black hole, we've got news for you: Black holes are so lethal that you could die in a handful of ways before you even reach the event horizon.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They've never been seen, but according to Einstein's general theory of relativity, they might exist.
The short answer, unfortunately, is no. White holes are really just something scientists have imagined — they could exist, but we've never seen one, or even seen clues that one may exist. For now, they are an idea. To put it simply, you can imagine a white hole as being a black hole in reverse.
A black hole forms when the mass of an object, like a star, suddenly collapses down to a tiny volume. A small object with a large mass causes a gaping dent in space-time. This enormous warp creates a gravitational field so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape from it.
Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape them, not even light. Even before you reach the event horizon – the point of no return – you would be “spaghettified” by the black hole's tidal forces. Astronomers do not actually know what goes on inside black holes.
New black hole simulations that incorporate quantum gravity indicate that when a black hole dies, it produces a gravitational shock wave that radiates information, a finding that could solve the information paradox.
Black holes, the insatiable monsters of the universe, are impossible to kill with any of the weapons in our grasp. The only thing that can hasten a black hole's demise is a cable made of cosmic strings, a hypothetical material predicted by string theory.