Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in
The closest black hole to Earth is a stellar mass black hole just 1,600 lightyears away called Gaia BH1.
Gaia BH1, at ~10 solar masses, with an orbital period of ~180 days, and located just 1560 light-years away, now holds the record (as of 2022) for closest black hole known to our Solar System.
The nearest black hole to Earth has been found by astronomers, and it is just 1,600 light-years away.
The two black holes are being called Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2 and are the closest to Earth of any black holes found so far, ESA said. Gaia BH1 is situated only 1,560 light-years away - about thrice as close as the previous record holder.
Problem is, no such thing has even been detected. Now part of the trouble is that these impacts would be rare. For the smallest PBH masses, there may only be one black hole hitting the earth every million years. For the Phobos-mass black holes or larger, you may only get one in the history of the earth.
As you might expect, the possibility of time travel involves those most extreme objects, black holes. And since Einstein's theory is a theory of space and time, it should be no surprise that black holes offer, in principle, a way to travel through space, as well as through time. A simple black hole won't do, though.
Even if we see the universe from a point very close to the apparent event horizon, the time dilates to such an extent that the time of the locations away from tne universe will be much faster (say 1 second for the observer near blak hole will be 100000 years for an observer on earth).
Most stellar black holes, however, are very difficult to detect. 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.
Loeb told Salon that the most recent paper shows "exciting evidence for a recoiled supermassive black hole moving at a speed of 1600 kilometers per second through the gas of its host galaxy." "At that speed it will escape from its host galaxy into intergalactic space in the future.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
We are in absolutely no danger from black holes. They're a bit like tigers – it's a bad idea to stick your head in their mouth, but you're probably not going to meet one on your way to the shops. Unlike tigers, black holes don't hunt. They're not roaming around space eating stars and planets.
Einstein's theory of general relativity mathematically predicts the existence of wormholes, but none have been discovered to date. A negative mass wormhole might be spotted by the way its gravity affects light that passes by.
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is some 1,600 lightyears from Earth.
The first black hole ever discovered was Cygnus X-1, located within the Milky Way in the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. Astronomers saw the first signs of the black hole in 1964 when a sounding rocket detected celestial sources of X-rays according to NASA.
As black holes evaporate, they get smaller and smaller and their event horizons get uncomfortably close to the central singularities. In the final moments of black holes' lives, the gravity becomes too strong, and the black holes become too small, for us to properly describe them with our current knowledge.
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. 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.
For all practical purposes the matter has disappeared from the universe. 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.
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.
on edge of Black Hole. Space and time are intertwined, called space-time, and gravity has the ability to stretch space-time. Objects with a large mass will be able to stretch space-time to the point where our perception of it changes, known as time dilation.
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
There's nothing on the other side.
General relativity says that when matter falls into a black hole, information is destroyed, but quantum mechanics says firmly it can't be. A unified theory requires us to somehow reconcile the two, probably by reimagining space-time as only an approximate thing.
In fact, the possibility of creating a black hole in a lab is a goal that scientists are actively pursuing—one that could allow researchers to answer many fundamental questions about quantum mechanics and the nature of gravity. A black hole typically forms when a star much more massive than our sun dies.