Is it possible for a black hole to "eat" an entire galaxy? No. There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large, but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.
Observational evidence indicates that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. For example, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole in its Galactic Center, corresponding to the radio source Sagittarius A*.
Contrary to popular belief, the Solar System would not be sucked in: a solar-mass black hole would exert no more gravitational pull than our Sun. As this computer simulation shows, the planets would actually continue on in their orbits as if nothing had happened. Are you a journalist?
Logically, these giant black holes—each millions to billions of times heavier than our sun—must collide and merge, too. Such mergers can channel huge volumes of material into the black holes, sparking violent astrophysical outbursts that shape star formation and other processes in their host galaxies.
For example, one of the highest mass consumption rates for a black hole has been measured to be about one solar mass every two days. That amounts to about 183 solar masses per year.
The diet of known black holes consists mostly of gas and dust, which fill the otherwise empty space throughout the Universe. Black holes can also consume material torn from nearby stars. In fact, the most massive black holes can swallow stars whole.
The overwhelming majority of the Universe will not be consumed by black holes, but rather flung into intergalactic space. Once there, they will wander the Universe as “runaway stars” (or stellar remnants) for as long as the Universe still exists.
Will humans survive the Andromeda collision? A: There is a 1 in 400,000 chance that humans will survive the Andromeda collision.
Someday our little corner of the universe will have a ringside seat for one of the biggest events in the cosmos. Two billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda, our closest neighboring galaxy, will begin to fuse into one giant football-shaped galaxy.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole. Such an event would be extremely violent.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole.
Black holes are dark, dense regions in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Not even light can get out of these regions. That is why we cannot see black holes—they are invisible to our eyes. Because nothing can get out of black holes, physicists struggle understanding these objects.
The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
We might be the product of another, older universe. Call it our mother universe. The seed this mother universe forged inside a black hole may have had its big bounce 13.8 billion years ago, and even though our universe has been rapidly expanding ever since, we could still be hidden behind a black hole's event horizon.
At the animation's larger scale lies M87's black hole, now with a updated mass of 5.4 billion Suns. Its shadow is so big that even a beam of light – traveling at 670 million mph (1 billion kph) – would take about two and a half days to cross it.
Now the Andromeda galaxy can be seen with the naked eye, like a tiny dot in the sky. But in three billion years it will be so clearly visible to the naked eye that it will even be possible to see individual spiral arms in it.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.
Our Milky Way is on a collision course with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda. Today Andromeda is visible as a speck of light in the night sky, but about 5 billion years from now, it will be tangled up with us. Our galaxy's spiral arms will disappear, and so will our supermassive black hole.
According to the research, the halo of both the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy have started touching each other. The halo of a galaxy is essentially a large layer of gasses, space dust and outlier stars that surrounds a galaxy. These halos determine the true extent of a galaxy.
Eventually humans will go extinct. At the most wildly optimistic estimate, our species will last perhaps another billion years but end when the expanding envelope of the sun swells outward and heats the planet to a Venus-like state. But a billion years is a long time.
When you're wondering what happens when two galaxies collide, try not to think of objects smashing into each other or violent crashes. Instead, as galaxies collide, new stars are formed as gasses combine, both galaxies lose their shape, and the two galaxies create a new supergalaxy that is elliptical.
Inside what's known as the black hole's event horizon, not even light itself can escape from a black hole. But that doesn't mean that black holes will live forever; on the contrary, they slowly decay away due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.
In astrophysics, spaghettification is the tidal effect caused by strong gravitational fields. When falling towards a black hole, for example, an object is stretched in the direction of the black hole (and compressed perpendicular to it as it falls).
There's nothing on the other side.