After just a few minutes more — 21 to 22 minutes total — the entire mass of the Earth would have collapsed into a black hole just 1.75 centimeters (0.69”) in diameter: the inevitable result of an Earth's mass worth of material collapsing into a black hole.
The Earth's Schwarzschild radius is thought to be around 8.7mm, or roughly 17.5mm in diameter. A U.S. cent is around 19mm in diameter, so if someone were to shrink the Earth down to a little less than the size of a U.S. cent, it would become a black hole.
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.
A black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of about a centimeter, which would make it about the size of a coin, would have about the same mass as the Earth. The reason the Earth will be destroyed but not simply swallowed up is because the Earth will be resisting the black hole in at least two ways.
Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.
It is, in fact, and some physicists say they could be one and the same: The singularity in every black hole might give birth to a baby universe. There's no reason to think our universe is any different.
The black hole in the triple system HR 6819 is just 1000 light-years from Earth. The Milky Way Galaxy is thought to contain hundreds of millions of black holes. But only a few dozen have revealed themselves—through the x-ray glow of hot gases that surround them.
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.
Over time they shrink down to nothing and simply pop away in a flash of energy. 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.
Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe.
In astrophysics, spaghettification (sometimes referred to as the noodle effect) is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (rather like spaghetti) in a very strong, non-homogeneous gravitational field. It is caused by extreme tidal forces.
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 singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man's land: a place where matter is compressed down to an infinitely tiny point, and all conceptions of time and space completely break down. And it doesn't really exist. Something has to replace the singularity, but we're not exactly sure what.
There's nothing on the other side.
For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe. 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.
Since the Milky Way contains over 100 billion stats, our home galaxy must harbor some 100 million black holes. Though detecting black holes is a difficult task and estimates from NASA suggest there could be as many as 10 million to a billion stellar black holes in the Milky Way.
However, have you ever wondered, which is the biggest black hole in the universe? Known as TON 618, it is the most massive black hole observed so far in the Universe. NASA has revealed that it tips the scales at 66 billion times the Sun's mass! Know more about this massive black hole in the universe.
Anything outside this surface —including astronauts, rockets, or light—can escape from the black hole. But once this surface is crossed, nothing can escape, regardless of its speed, because of the strong gravitational pull toward the center of the black hole.
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.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
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.