• Question: what would happen if the black hole came too close to the our solar system (Milky Way)?

    Asked by anon-267545 on 11 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      If you want to see for yourself I can recommend trying this out: http://universesandbox.com/ – it’s a sandbox that lets you play with things in space, including throwing a black hole through the Solar System.

      Short answer: all the planets could be torn away from the Sun or at least pulled into different orbits, which would be very bad for life on Earth. Thankfully this doesn’t seem likely, since the Earth has been fine for billions of years, aside from the time something slammed into it and made the Moon.

    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      Unless you’re very close to a black hole’s event horizon, the weird physics of the black hole doesn’t really matter. You’re just adding an extra object that has a mass, and it affects other planets’ positions.
      .
      So it really depends on the size of a black hole you are talking about. The black hole in the center of the Milky Way is supermassive, and having one of these come our way would be awful. Black holes of about the same mass as the Sun are common, and those would also be quite bad, like Sam said. But adding an extra star would be way worse!
      .
      But if a theoretical smaller black hole (the size of a planet or even smaller) came by, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. As Roan said in some other response, there is even a theory that dark matter is made of very tiny black holes. They don’t affect us, so we don’t notice them.
      .
      Another way to think about it is: if, say, Venus became a black hole right now, we wouldn’t even notice – except that it’ll disappear from the night sky 🙂

Comments