Credit: Paul Cornish with Bruce McCandless image by NASA.
Am I going to get sucked into a black hole?
We are in absolutelyno dangerfrom black holes. They’re a bit like tigers – it’s a bad idea to stick your head in their mouth, but you’re probably not going to meet one on your way to the shops.
Unlike tigers, black holes don’t hunt. They’re not roaming around space eating stars and planets. 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 around30 million yearsto travel there in a rocket!
But what if our Sun turned into a black hole?
The good news is our Sun is not a big enough star for that to happen.
Even if a black hole took the place of our Sun, Earth wouldn’t get sucked in. If the black hole was the same mass as the Sun, then it would have the same gravity as the Sun. Earth and all the other planets of our Solar System would stay in the same orbit.
We’d be walking around in the dark and we’d be very cold, but we wouldn’t be squished into spaghetti!
Although we may not be in any immediate danger from them, it seems as if we’re right to be at least a bit wary of black holes. But, if we think of black holes only as terrifying orbs of death, we’re missing out on all the truly exciting things about them.
What are supermassive black holes?
Scientists believe that at the centre of most galaxies in the Universe there’s a supermassive black hole.
Black holes that form from the remains of high mass stars are usually aboutthree to ten timesthe mass of our Sun. But supermassive black holes can bemillions, or even billionstimes more massive than our Sun.
In 2019 an image of the silhouette of the supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy called Messier 87 was revealed. This was the first picture of a black hole ever captured, and it was done with the Event Horizon Telescope. The EHT is actually several radio telescopes placed around the world that work together to make one virtual Earth-sized telescope.
