Welcome to the void.
Black holes remain the most mysterious
and destructive force in our Universe.
And when one explodes,
the devastation permanently changes
the structure of the Universe.
But what if not one but all the black holes
in the Universe suddenly exploded?
In 2016, astronomers discovered the remnants of an explosion
from a supermassive black hole almost 400 light-years from Earth.
The event ripped through space
and created a cosmic crater wide enough
for 18 Milky Way galaxies to fit inside.
This one blast ripped apart
the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster
and raged for over 100 million years.
A black hole,
which is the remains of a dead star,
contains a large concentration of matter squeezed into a tiny area.
And its gravitational field becomes
so strong that all matter,
and even light,
gets sucked into its vortex.
The Milky Way galaxy alone contains over 400 million black holes.
Yeah.
In the center of our home galaxy,
there's a supermassive black hole
over four million solar masses wide.
And studies have found that most galaxies
have these gravitational monsters at their core.
These supermassive black holes,
like the one in our backyard,
can expand to billions of times
the size of the Sun.
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Now, speaking of black holes,
1% of these giants has a swirling mass
of gas and dust called an accretion disk.
The orbiting debris from this disk falls inside the black hole
and shoots out at nearly the speed of light.
Guided by twisted magnetic fields,
the metals and radiation would burn brightly and return to the cosmos.
Debris from the accretion disk endlessly feeds this giant singularity.
But what would it take for this behemoth to explode?
And the amount of gas it displaced would equal several trillion Suns.
Across the Universe,
the blast would rip galaxies apart and destroy planets.
And depending on the amount of gas it took in,
the explosion could continue for hundreds of millions of years.
Unfortunately for planet Earth,
we lay right in the path of a jet stream from Sagittarius A,
the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way.
Superhot particles ejected from the black hole
would slam into our planet along with lethal levels of radiation.
Once the x-ray and gamma-ray photons
reached Earth, they would destroy the ozone layer within months.
With this protective layer gone,
It would take over 1,000 years
for those gamma rays to hit our planet
if the closest black hole, HR 6819, exploded.
So while we might see several hundred new bright spots in the sky,
it would take a millennium before our planet would feel its effects.
I mean, if we're still around.
This cataclysmic event wouldn't destroy the entire Universe,
just large parts of it.
But the same materials left behind from
blast would create the seeds for new life.
Over hundreds of billions of years,
these particles could become new stars, galaxies or even life.
On Earth, time near the edge of the black hole would appear to last billions of years.
And near the border of the singularity,
an object would seem to hover there endlessly.
But what would happen if Earth were sucked into a black hole?
Well, as always, that's a story for another WHAT IF.