![]() ![]() "Short of a hyper-advanced civilization with near-unlimited resources and energy that would purposefully 'launch' a black hole towards the solar system, such an encounter is so unlikely as to be close to zero," Gobielle said. Experts said there is almost zero chance of black hole ever colliding with the Earth. ![]() While there are countless stars in our galaxy alone, random encounters between them are extremely rare due to the immense space between the objects, Jonathan Zrake, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson University, told Newsweek.Īrtist's illustration of a black hole with surrounding material. "Objects we might deem as 'large' and 'dense' are fairly rare in the grand scheme of the universe, these being planets, stars, and the associated stellar remnants stars leave behind including white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes," Gobielle said. In the galaxy and the solar system this density is significantly higher, but still almost non-existent." "The overall average luminous matter density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. "For starters, space is aptly named," Doug Gobielle, a professor in the physics department at the University of Rhode Island, told Newsweek. ![]() Misaligned accretion disks may be common around supermassive black holes, which would spin more slowly and rapidly grow, providing an explanation for how holes that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang quickly gained so much mass.Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so extreme that nothing, not even light-the fastest thing in the universe-can escape.īut is there a possibility that planet Earth will ever be pulled into a black hole? And if so, what would happen in this scenario? What are the chances of Earth being consumed by a black hole?Įxperts who spoke to Newsweek said there is practically zero chance of the Earth ever colliding with a black hole before it is swallowed by the sun in around five billion years' time. He said XMM-Newton was able to follow “an Earth-sized clump of matter for about a day, as it was pulled towards the black hole, accelerating to a third of the velocity of light before being swallowed up by the hole.” While such winds are now found in many active galaxies, PG1211+143 has now yielded another ‘first’, with the detection of matter plunging directly into the hole itself.” “Indeed, some 15 years ago we detected a powerful wind indicating the hole was being over-fed. “The galaxy we were observing with XMM-Newton has a 40 million solar mass black hole which is very bright and evidently well fed,” Pounds said. The UK’s Dirac supercomputer facility indicated such collision would cancel out the rings’ rotation, allowing gas to fall directly into the black hole. The observation agreed with theoretical work that simulated the formation of misaligned accretion disks and subsequent collisions. They observed strongly red-shifted spectra showing trapped gas, with almost no rotation around the hole, being pulled in at 30 percent the speed of light. As it turns out, misaligned rotation can result in multiple rings of debris, providing a mechanism for gas and even entire stars to be pulled into a super-massive black hole from any direction.Ī team led by Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope to observe the surroundings of a 40-million-solar-mass black hole at the heart of a Seyfert galaxy known as PG1211+143 in the constellation Coma Berenices. By definition, the black holes cannot be seen, but they can be detected by the radiation emitted as gas and dust are pulled in and heated to enormous temperatures before crossing the point of no return – the event horizon – and vanishing from the knowable universe.īut even supermassive black holes are so compact gas tends to rotate around them instead of falling straight in, forming a spinning accretion disk in which material spirals inward as it is accelerated by the hole’s enormous gravity.Īstronomers assumed the disk would be aligned with the black hole’s rotation axis, but it was not required. University of LeicesterĪ team of UK astronomers has detected gas being sucked into a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy one billion light years from Earth that is racing inward at an extraordinary 30 percent the speed of light, or roughly 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) per second.īlack holes with millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun are believed to lurk in the cores of most, if not all, major galaxies. The movie below shows how such “chaotic accretion” might evolve over time. ![]() A computer simulation of misaligned accretion disks and rings around a supermassive black hole can collide and tear, allowing gas to fall directly into the central hole at enormous velocities (red arrows). ![]()
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