• Question: Will the earth eventually be sucked into the black hole?

    Asked by Djenne to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 7 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      Its fairly unlikely.
      There are two types of black hole around commonly.
      Stellar back holes are formed from big stars at the end of their life. Our own sun is not big enough to ever form one of these, so when it finishes burning in about 5 billion years it will just collapse down and go quietly.

      There are also super-massive black holes at the centre of every galaxy, these are so far away they don’t have any effect on us, so we won’t get sucked into that.

      About the only possibility would be if a stellar black hole came into our solar system, which would probably be very unlikely, and then it would have to almost hit the Earth to suck it in.

      So all in all – very very unlikely!

    • Photo: Jane MacArthur

      Jane MacArthur answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      As Julian said, black holes shouldn’t be a concern. The Earth is likely to be absorbed by the Sun in about 7.5 billion years, when the Sun expands into a red giant star before its collapse, which will see it grow in size beyond the orbit of the Earth. However, the Earth will first become unhabitable in 600 million – 1 billion years due to increases in energy from the Sun before that.

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      Nope, good news! We’re safe.
      As the others mentioned, there are ‘supermassive’ black holes at the centre of galaxies – including our own – and also lots of smaller ‘stellar’ black holes formed by very heavy (massive) stars when they die. Our sun isn’t large enough to form a black hole – it will just get much bigger and cooler, turning into what we call a Red Giant. The black hole in the centre of our galaxy is huge but actually isn’t a worry either. We’re really far from it, and black holes don’t ‘suck’ like hoovers. They attract other objects with their gravity, just like planets only much stronger.

    • Photo: Hugh Osborn

      Hugh Osborn answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Unfortunately, Sci-fi has been lying to everyone to years: Black Holes don’t actually suck. For example, if the Sun was replaced with a black hole, things would get a bit dark here on Earth, but our planet would keep on orbiting exactly as it has done for 4.5billion years. So you don’t need to worry about Black Holes destroying the Earth! Humans on the other hand…

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