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.
As mentioned earlier, there are millions of black holes out there, and they don't just run around swallowing worlds. “They follow the laws of gravity just like other objects in space. The orbit of a black hole would have to be very close to the solar system to affect Earth, which is not likely,” NASA explained.
The closest black hole to Earth is a stellar mass black hole just 1,600 lightyears away called Gaia BH1. The black hole has set a new record for the closest known black hole to Earth. Its presence was revealed after ESA's Gaia space telescope observed the unusual motion of its stellar companion, a Sun-like star.
Ripped apart: The Earth would stand no chance if it encountered a rogue black hole; the cosmic black hole's tidal forces would easily rip the planet apart. Lost in space: Matter piles up in a superheated, rapidly spinning disc before plunging through the horizon of a black hole, never to reappear again.
Black holes, the gigantic remains of collapsed stars that are massive inescapable singularities of gravity, will eventually evaporate and fade into nothingness, something that Stephen Hawking predicted. But the same fate also awaits literally everything else, a recent study suggests.
Death by black hole
Of course, no matter what type of black hole you plunge into, you're ultimately going to get torn apart by its extreme gravity and die a horrible death. No material that falls inside a black hole could survive intact.
Will the Sun become a black hole? No, it's too small for that! The Sun would need to be about 20 times more massive to end its life as a black hole.
It's not exactly fast. A good size black hole — say, a few times more massive than the sun — will take about 10^100 years to eventually evaporate through this process, known as Hawking Radiation.
There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
The resulting uninhabitable black hole would have such a powerful gravitational pull that not even light could avoid it. So, should you then find yourself at the event horizon — the point at which light and matter can only pass inward, as proposed by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild — there is no escape.
Yes, there are black holes in the ocean — aka ocean eddies. Stick around to learn about some of the most notable ones. The ocean is full of mysteries. Between underwater volcanoes and the Bermuda Triangle, scientists probably weren't all that surprised when they discovered black holes in the ocean too.
In some cases, called X-ray binaries, the black hole pulls gas off the star into a disk that heats up enough to produce X-rays. Binaries have revealed around 50 suspected or confirmed stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, but scientists think there may be as many as 100 million in our galaxy alone.
As a black hole evaporates, it slowly shrinks and, as it loses mass, the rate of particles escaping also increases until all the remaining energy escapes at once. In the final tenth of a second of a black hole's life, “you will have a huge flash of light and energy,” Natarajan says.
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.
“In this process of the sun becoming a red giant, it's likely going to obliterate the inner planets … likely Mercury and Venus will be destroyed,” Blackman said. Earth may survive the event, but will not be habitable. Once the sun completely runs out fuel, it will contract into a cold corpse of a star – a white dwarf.
After the Sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core, it will balloon into a red giant, consuming Venus and Mercury. Earth will become a scorched, lifeless rock — stripped of its atmosphere, its oceans boiled off. Astronomers aren't sure exactly how close the Sun's outer atmosphere will come to Earth.
Black hole news: Standing on edge of black hole would cause 700 years to pass in 1 minute.
Beyond the event horizon lies a truly minuscule point called a singularity, where gravity is so intense that it infinitely curves space-time itself. This is where the laws of physics, as we know them, break down, meaning all theories about what lies beyond are just speculation.
No human has ever been inside of a black hole. Humans are not yet capable of interstellar travel. Even if a human was able to travel to a black hole, he or she would not be able to survive entering it. Black holes condense all the matter that falls into it into one point called a quantum singularity.