In the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,
there is a supermassive black hole
feeding on nearby stars.
It's called Sagittarius A*.
And if a giant gravitational monster
slowly eating the galaxy isn't terrifying enough,
there is another cosmic monstrosity
lurking around it.
This monstrosity creeping through the Milky Way
is a remnant of a giant, exploded star.
But it's not just any remnant.
It's an extremely dense and very magnetic
collapsed stellar core.
Let me refresh your knowledge of magnetars.
They are born when a star,
at least eight times more massive than our Sun,
reaches its expiration date,
and explodes in a beautiful supernova.
Much of that star is gone,
but the dense core of it remains.
Most of these remnants become neutron stars.
They spin very fast,
usually a few times per second.
And they're composed of neutrons.
Some neutron stars have such strong magnetic fields
that they emit electromagnetic radiation from their poles.
That makes them pulsars,
and you can observe them with a telescope
when their poles face the Earth.
Only a few such pulsars develop
such an extremely powerful magnetic field.
They become the strongest magnets in the Universe.
They spin once every ten seconds,
but their magnetic field is
a hundred times stronger
than that of a neutron star.
If one of those magnets came
halfway between the Moon and the Earth,
it wouldn't be pretty.
But would it be as bad from
a distance of 26 light-years away?
What I'd like to know is,
would a magnetar swallow a black hole?
Or would a black hole gobble up a magnetar?
The collision of these two giants
wouldn't end up in an explosion,
but in a quiet cosmic merger,
stretched over billions of years.
Although magnetars are incredibly powerful,
they would lose the battle with a black hole.
Depending on the trajectory of the magnetar,
as well as the size and mass of
both the magnetar and the black hole,
the magnetic monster would be eaten up
either whole, or slowly, piece by piece.
As the magnetar was being torn apart by the black hole,
it would be sending gravitational waves throughout the Universe,
disturbing the curvature of spacetime.
Once the black hole consumed the magnetar,
its mass would increase and expand its event horizon.
And thanks to this expansion,
more and more stars would be
flung into its dark density.
The black hole would be slowly
eating our galaxy, star by star.
Eventually, after quadrillions of years of star consumption,
the black hole could gobble up the Milky Way, all of it.
By that time, humanity would
most likely be long gone anyway.
That is unless another cosmic event
disrupts this feast some 4.5 billion years from now.
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.