• Question: What is the possibility of a massive black hole that could devour the universe and what is at the end of a wormhole?

    Asked by Ethan King03 to Julian, Helen on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      We know there are massive black holes, there is one at the centre of the galaxy. However they are not rampaging monsters. A black hole will consume anything that falls into it, but then so will anything that falls into our Sun disappear for ever.
      Stars will happily orbit a black hole for ever, as they are too big to easily move from their orbit into the black hole. So mostly the black hole “feeds” on gas and dust that happens to come nearby.

      So no – a black hole won’t devour the universe.

      As to the wormhole – no one knows if these are real. If they are, then the other end is somewhere else in space, probably a long long way away from the entrance.

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      Hi Ethan 🙂
      It’s impossible for a black hole to devour the whole Universe. As Julian explains, black holes aren’t these monstrous things that can ‘suck’ in all of the Universe like giant vacuum cleaners – they just have such strong gravity that if things happen to get too close they wouldn’t be able to escape again, not even light. Stars happily orbit black holes like the one at the centre of our galaxy, and will continue to do so for many billions of years.

      The other factor is just that even if black holes WERE giant cosmic hoovers, galaxies are just so far apart that what’s in one rarely affects what’s in another. Sometimes we get what are called galaxy ‘mergers’ – when two galaxies come together and interact via gravity – but these don’t happen very much in the present day. In general, we know that the Universe is expanding, so galaxies will just continue getting further away from each other.

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