"The Sun doesn't care what's there creating that mass. "Remember at the centre of our galaxy we have SgrA*, we have this supermassive black hole that's there and our Sun just orbits around it with the rest of the galaxy," Dr Bauer said. Mind you, things would be a lot darker on Earth. And the same thing happens on the larger scale of the galaxy. This means gravitationally nothing changes, Earth has no idea that the Sun has suddenly changed into a black hole and so it just continues its orbit. Earth also still has the same mass and still be the same 150 million kilometres away from it, and gravitationally speaking the only things that matter are your mass and how far away you are." "Think about what would happen to Earth, the Sun would still have the same mass if it were a black hole instead of a star. "If the Sun could magically turn into a black hole (which as we already pointed out it can't), then all its stuff would get shoved down into a tiny little volume maybe a couple of kilometres across. This is because you have to be very close to a black hole to feel the strength of its gravity, and gravity gets weaker the further away you get, Dr Bauer said. ( NASA/CXC/M.Weiss) Myth 3: Black holes will suck up all the matter in the universe like a giant vacuum cleanerįortunately, this isn't likely to be true. This black hole pulls matter from blue star beside it. There's nothing else we think that it could be other than a black hole."Īn artist's drawing of a black hole named Cygnus X-1. "And you find that there is something there that's over four million times the mass of our Sun but in a tiny area that produces absolutely no light. We can watch maybe a dozen of these stars orbiting around SgrA*, Dr Bauer says, and use very basic physics equations to calculate the mass of any of these stars and the thing they're orbiting around in order to account for the motion of that star. "We have something at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy called SgrA* that doesn't produce any light, and we can watch individual stars going around it, not in nice circular orbits, but in highly elliptical, elongated paths," Dr Bauer said. With modern telescopes we can see how black holes affect the stars orbiting around them. "While we can't actually see them directly, mathematically we have known about black holes since Albert Einstein's time, since the early 1900s," Dr Bauer said. Astronomers can see the effects of black holes on the space around them. Myth 2: Black holes aren't real because you can't see themīlack holes can't be seen because light can't escape from them, but that doesn't mean they can't be detected using other means. "When a star maybe 10 times more massive than the Sun goes supernova, its core collapses beyond the neutron star phase to form an even denser object called a stellar mass black hole," Dr Bauer said. If the Sun was a far more massive star then it would have a more violent death, exploding as a supernova and leaving behind a super-dense object called a neutron star. You have to be very close to the black hole to get sucked in. The Sun will then puff off its outer gaseous envelope, leaving behind its white hot stellar core, and become a white dwarf. Instead in about 6 billion years' time, the Sun will expand to become a red giant star with a diameter stretching maybe as far as Earth's orbit. No, our Sun isn't massive enough to become a black hole. Myth 1: Our Sun will become a black hole when it dies "Most people know that a black hole is a very small volume of space with a lot of stuff in it, so that its gravity is so strong nothing can escape from it, not even if it's travelling at the speed of light," said Dr Amanda Bauer, astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory.īut there's a lot more to know about black holes than that. So, here are some common black hole myths that you'll never be sucked into again.Īre black holes portals to other worlds or monsters gobbling up everything in sight? How much of what we see in movies is science fiction and how much is science fact? Black holes are the stuff of science and sci-fi and the line between fact and fiction can often be blurred.
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