What are the chances of Earth being consumed by a black hole? Experts who spoke to Newsweek said there is practically zero chance of the Earth ever colliding with a black hole before it is swallowed by the sun in around five billion years' time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In pure general relativity, with no other modifications or considerations of other physics, they remain black for eternity. Once one forms, it will just hang out there, being a black hole, forever.
There is no black hole near our Solar System, so there is no chance of Earth ever getting sucked into a black hole. In fact, the closest black hole to Earth is 1560 light years away from us. It would take us around 30 million years to travel there in a rocket!
Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.
There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves, such as Gödel spacetime, but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain. Many in the scientific community believe that backward time travel is highly unlikely.
To make a black hole, one must concentrate mass or energy sufficiently that the escape velocity from the region in which it is concentrated exceeds the speed of light. Some extensions of present physics posit the existence of extra dimensions of space.
Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never conclusively identified an isolated 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. Such an event would be extremely violent.
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.
No. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.
Black holes themselves cannot be seen: their gravitational fields are so strong that nothing can escape them—including light. That is why their edges are called event horizons, because, much like with normal horizons, seeing beyond them is impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Astronomers have discovered the nearest known black hole to Earth, and it's twice as close as the previous record holder. The space-time singularity, named Gaia BH1, is 1,566 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus and is roughly 10 times more massive than our sun.
Some black holes, called supermassive black holes, may have as much matter as 1000 million Suns!