What would happen if a black hole wandered into our solar system?

Last edited Fri Jul 26, 2024, 08:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Black holes aren't "cosmic vacuum cleaners," but what would happen if one wandered into our solar system?


Black holes are massive, mostly invisible and so powerful not even light can escape them. So what would happen if one entered our solar system? It depends on a lot of factors, including the size and distance of the black hole, experts told Live Science. But in many scenarios, not much would happen."They're not, per se, destructive," Karina Voggel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center in France, told Live Science. "It's just mass. Very compressed mass, but mass. It's not a cosmic vacuum cleaner." If a black hole did wander into our solar system, the largest effects would be gravitational. And those effects would depend on the mass of the black hole.

"The black holes that we're confident exist are all much more massive than the sun," Robert McNees, an associate professor of physics at Loyola University Chicago, told Live Science. "And the sun's gravity dominates the behavior of bodies in the solar system all the way out to tremendous distances, and so anything more massive than the sun wandering into our neighborhood on scales much larger than the solar system would have noticeable effects." The black holes we know of are either stellar-mass black holes — that is, black holes that are between a few to 100 times the mass of the sun — or supermassive black holes, which are 100,000 to billions of times the mass of the sun and are generally found at the centers of galaxies. But there are other possibilities, too.

(snip)

However, if a stellar-mass or larger black hole were to whiz through our solar system, it could spell disaster, depending on how close and how fast it was. If it passed through the Oort cloud — the most distant region of the solar system — it could disturb the comets and asteroids that orbit there and cause them to head toward our own planet, Voggel said. If the black hole got a bit closer — say, 100 astronomical units, or just beyond the orbit of Pluto — it could change the orbits of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "But likely Earth wouldn't be affected much yet," Voggel said. Only once the black hole crossed between the orbits of Uranus and Pluto would Earth start to feel its effects. "If Uranus and Pluto were passed by really close, they might get attracted by the black hole dynamically so much that they're now in orbit around the black hole," Voggel said. And now our orbit would be altered." That could change our seasons, plunging us into an ice age or raising temperatures so much that life on Earth went extinct.

If the black hole passed within Saturn's orbit, it would probably move us outside the habitable zone where liquid water can exist. If it passed within Jupiter's orbit, we'd begin to feel tidal effects as Earth began to orbit the black hole. "If you go even closer … between us and Mars or something, then you resurface the Earth," Voggel said. "The tidal effects would heat it. You would have magma; the oceans would evaporate; definitely no life possible anymore."

https://www.livescience.com/space/black-holes/ultra-rare-black-hole-found-hiding-in-the-center-of-the-milky-way