Astronomers have discovered a black hole closer to Earth than any other previously found. It's about ten times as massive as our sun and is located just 1,600 light-years away—rather nearby on a cosmic scale.
So it would take 25,000 years to get there if you traveled at the speed of light. Actually, that's the amount of time it would take from the perspective of the outside world. From the perspective of a traveler moving at the speed of light, it would appear to take no time at all.
The odds are incredibly small, scientists say. "Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that," NASA noted in 2018, adding that the sun isn't big enough to become a black hole.
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The culprit appears to be a supermassive black hole believed to be hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun located roughly 8.5 billion light years away from Earth.
The closest known black hole may have been found a cosmic stone's throw from Earth, just 1500 light years away. Called Gaia BH1, it is estimated to be about 10 times the mass of our sun.
In pure general relativity, with no other modifications or considerations of other physics, they remain black for eternity. Once one forms, it will just hang out there, being a black hole, forever.
Light-year is the distance light travels in one year. Light zips through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second and 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers) per year.
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.
Once inside the black hole's event horizon, matter will be torn apart into its smallest subatomic components and eventually be squeezed into the singularity. As the singularity accumulates more and more matter, the size of the black hole's event horizon increases proportionally.
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.
Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that. Even if a black hole the same mass as the sun were to take the place of the sun, Earth still would not fall in.
Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.
One hour for a black hole observer would equate to 100,000,000 years for a person on Earth. Therefore one minute in a black hole would be roughly 1,700,000 years.
Astronomers estimate that 100 million black holes roam among the stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but they have never conclusively identified an isolated black hole.
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.
Be afraid of the dark. Black holes, the insatiable monsters of the universe, are impossible to kill with any of the weapons in our grasp. The only thing that can hasten a black hole's demise is a cable made of cosmic strings, a hypothetical material predicted by string theory. But there is reason to take heart.
It was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together eight existing radio observatories across the planet to form a single “Earth-sized” virtual telescope. The telescope is named after the “event horizon”, the boundary of the black hole beyond which no light can escape.
A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Re: How would you age at the speed of light
The simple answer is, anything moving through space at c, equal to the speed of light in a vacuum, experiences zero time flow. If you were to travel at the speed of light, you would experience no time.
SInce light-year is the distance travelled by the light in one year while travelling with the speed of light i.e. 3×108m/s 3 × 10 8 m / s . It would take 500 years to travel 500 light-year distance at the speed of light.
So the furthest out we can see is about 46.5 billion light years away, which is crazy, but it also means you can look back into the past and try to figure out how the universe formed, which again, is what cosmologists do.
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.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
The largest black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow. Larger black holes of up to 1014 (100 trillion) M ☉ may form during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of 10109 to 10110 years. Hawking radiation has a thermal spectrum.