Only Known Survivor to Escape a Black Hole

dark ever hungry monsters live all across the universe they're born when massive stars blast into space black holes as heavy as earth are just as large as a ping-pong ball they don't have a surface but their gravity is so strong even light can't escape it black holes don't have physical boundaries like a membrane either the event horizon which is closest to a typical boundary is a threshold which after passing you can't get out for a star running into a black hole normally ends in a spectacular light show and its destruction just one star that astronomers know of managed to survive an encounter with a black hole as heavy as 400 000 suns it happened in a galaxy about 250 million light years away from earth astronomers with really powerful equipment notice bursts of x-rays that raged in space every nine hours they thought they must be mayday signals from a star trapped by a cosmic abyss the star was an average red giant when it met its new friend for the first time when they got too close to each other the hungry space monster couldn't resist the temptation and snacked on its guest when it was done with the star's outer hydrogen layers all that was left with the star's core eventually the poor thing turned into a white dwarf but for some reason the giant space monster couldn't finish the meal and trapped it in its orbit for later instead ever since the now white dwarf has been traveling in nine hour laps it stays far enough from the hole so it won't fall in or get swallowed its journey isn't going super smoothly because of gravity the orbital path is constantly rotating after two days it resembles a spirograph pattern as the black hole keeps snacking on it the star keeps losing its mass and growing in size its own orbit is becoming more and more circular scientists believe one day it will be able to spiral away from its mean friend and turn into a planet the size of jupiter in a trillion years that's 70 times longer than the universe has existed so far so it might not ever happen the milky way alone has hundreds of millions of black holes and there are way more beyond it they might feed on other stars and release them in other galaxies the telescopes that exist now might not be strong enough to spot them most galaxies including our milky way have supermassive black holes at the center they can be billions of times heavier than the sun others of their kind are only three times the mass of the sun the nearest black hole to the earth was spotted one thousand light years away just around the corner in galactic terms it's in a star system you can see with an unaided eye scientists found it when they notice a star behaving weirdly it was a giant rotating like crazy they guessed it must have a powerful gravitational companion the hungriest black hole astronomers have spotted so far weighs as much as 34 billion suns and is about six times bigger than the one at the center of the milky way it eats the equivalent of one sun every day sometimes black holes even devour others of their kind that happen to be too close to them before you get on a spaceship to escape to some safe no black hole galaxy here's some good news even though they're super massive they don't have a radius large enough to destroy earth and even the hungriest of them are safe to watch from a distance no black hole should come closer to our planet than the sun for as long as the universe has existed multiplied by 10 billion times in the unlikely case one of these scary things passes by neptune it could affect the earth's orbit that would be no good in theory anything can turn into a black hole the only difference between it and the sun is the material their centers are made of it's incredibly dense in those huge space monsters in reality there's just one known way to make a black hole it has to be the gravitational collapse of a super massive star 20 to 30 times the mass of the sun so the sun will never ever become a black hole if it happened though and the former star retained its mass it would still have the same gravitational power earth would still keep going around it and wouldn't get pulled in its orbit would also remain as it is the only huge problem would be the lack of sunlight in reality the sun isn't massive enough for such a transformation and will eventually become a white dwarf a black hole won't ever eat an entire galaxy for lunch there are about 400 billion stars inside the milky way just around 0.1 percent of all the stars that will ever form will end up becoming black holes the ever hungry supermassive monster located right in the middle of a galaxy has an impressive gravitational reach but even that wouldn't be enough it has already eaten most of the stars that were close to it it already weighs like a few million suns so it can't grow much larger even if it keeps snacking on sun-like stars galaxies will keep bumping into each other and black holes will keep growing and merging but because the universe is already huge and keeps expanding these collisions and mergers won't go on forever black holes will travel this huge space like rogue stars they won't even be able to eat the dark matter on the outskirts of galaxies eventually all the black holes will perish but that would be a long long time from now if you ever become a space explorer and travel far enough to meet a black hole and fall into one your life won't instantly end instead things will be way more complicated the way you perceive space and time will change and your reality will split in two in one of them you'd cease existing in the other you'd live and enter the hole unharmed when you go deeper inside the hole you'll notice space becoming curvier and curvier at the center of the hole it's infinitely curved it's called singularity laws of physics based on the ideas of space and time don't have power here in a large enough hole millions of times more massive than the sun things would go perfectly smoothly for you and you just keep free falling feeling no gravity you can just keep falling and falling in total emptiness until you reach singularity you'd have no chance to move in the opposite direction in there space and time switch rolls time is constantly pulling you forward on earth but figuratively and it would be doing that quite physically inside the hole in a smaller hole the force of gravity would be stronger at your feet than your head that's why you would go through spaghettification this is how scientists call the process when you compress horizontally and stretch vertically like spaghetti because of crazy gravity of the black hole speaking of spaghetti how are black holes like an italian dinner because once you go pasta the event horizon you get spaghettified and since you're all by yourself you'd be feeling cannilony right now wow now i'm hungry meanwhile if you had a fellow space traveler who for some reason didn't end up in the black hole it would look all different to them they'd see you stretch and grow like through a huge magnifying glass the closer you get to the edge of the hole the more it would seem like you're moving in slow motion then you'd freeze and the flames would surround you you'd be in two places at the same time living different destinies but there would still be just one copy of you this is how black holes teach us nothing is real reality can be different to different people sometimes it's believed that we're all living inside a huge black hole everything in the universe started with the big bang but there's a theory saying there was also something before that it was a super dense seed that had all the mass and energy of the universe concentrated in it about as heavy as a billion suns it was a trillion times smaller than any particle humans can observe the seed could be born inside a black hole if you believe there's more than one universe black holes could also serve as doors between those universes it could be like a root that two trees share you can't see a black hole directly because it doesn't give off any light scientists used to be able to only spot them by what they were doing to their surroundings when over 200 scientists around the world worked together they managed to take the first pictures of that space oddity the equipment they used added together would be the power of a telescope the size of earth

Channel: BRIGHT SIDE

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Keywords: bright side, brightside, facts about space, space facts and mysteries, facts about space and the universe, event horizon, nearest black hole, facts about space and planets, black holes, facts about space bright side, facts about the universe, supermassive black hole, biggest black hole, black hole and a star, black hole eating a star, when black hole and star meet, rarest space events, unexplained space phenomena, black hole survivor, has anything ever escaped a black hole

Id: 8Yjsm6bUP7g

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021