could
a black hole devour us all one day
there are millions of them out there
just
waiting and if we happened to make
a black hole accidentally well
you better fasten your seat belts things
are really going to suck
literally what would we see
if we got pulled into a black hole
could earth orbit the sun and a black
hole
and would we survive spaghettification
this is what if and here's what would
happen
if earth were sucked into a black hole
just 3 000 light years from earth is
a black hole visible to the naked eye
thankfully we're a safe distance from
this stellar black hole and
many others like it there are
approximately
100 million of them out there in our
galaxy
that we know of they are
remnants of supernovae which occur when
stars 10 to 20 times larger than
our sun collapse in on themselves
stellar black holes are fairly common
and are about
16 kilometers in diameter and then
there's the much larger competition
supermassive black holes these
have a diameter roughly the size of our
solar system
and a mass greater than one million
suns combined one of them
known as sagittarius a is right
smack dab in the middle of our galaxy
so how close would a black hole need to
be
to be a danger to us well
technically a black hole the size of a
one millimeter pin
could destroy us if it was close enough
to earth
due to its incredibly dense mass and
extreme
gravitational pull our survival all
depends on whether we've surpassed
the event horizon or not you can
think of this as the black hole's point
of no return
anything beyond this point would have to
travel
faster than light to escape yeah good
luck with that
if earth got close enough the side
nearest to the black hole would begin
stretching toward it
our atmosphere would start to be
vacuumed up and then
huge chunks of the earth would rip apart
and follow suit
if earth managed to fall into the orbit
of the black hole
we'd experience tidal heating the strong
uneven gravitational pull on earth would
continuously
deform the planet this would generate a
tremendous amount of internal friction
heating the earth's core to disastrous
levels
it would likely give rise to earthquakes
volcanoes
and deadly tsunamis the trifecta of doom
eventually earth would begin to stretch
in a process
known as spaghettification and
not in the tasty cheesy tomatoey way
let's say you were a superhero and
decided to fight the black hole
headfirst
well your arms would be closer than your
feet
causing your body to stretch out
vertically and become
more and more compressed let's hope your
superpower
is elasticity for an
average sized stellar black hole
spaghettification can occur
several hundred kilometers away from the
event horizon
but for a super massive black hole
physicists believe that
this would happen inside the event
horizon due to its
size 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
the careful balance of the sun and our
many planets
would collapse which could send them
crashing into one another
and to add insult to injury our asteroid
belt would get
sucked toward us about 200 of the 552
894 asteroids we know of
are more than 100 kilometers across
so if one hits us we'd be dead before we
would turn into spaghetti
frankly i'm not sure which fate would be
worse
all of the matter in our solar system
would join
the accretion disk around the black hole
as
matter gets sucked into the black hole
it generates
massive amounts of radiation so even if
we
somehow survived all the asteroids we'd
likely die from the radiation
believe it or not astronomers have
discovered rare
circumbinary planets that orbit two
stars
while this may be a possibility with a
black hole
and our sun the extreme
tidal forces would likely make our
planet
uninhabitable and worse yet
we might get kicked out of orbit or
swallowed by the sun
or the black hole eventually sorry but
there's not an outcome where we win here
but and this is a big but
maybe we could find a way to protect
ourselves
in some hyper reinforced space shuttle
if we somehow made it past the event
horizon
we might be in for an even stranger time
physics as we know it would change
things like gravity
the speed of light even how atoms bind
and react
may be completely different the truth is
we don't know what would happen we can't
get any information out of a black hole
would we get pulled into another
dimension
end up in a parallel universe or
maybe we're already inside a black hole
what we do know however is that
that's a story for another
what if
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you