• Question: Has there been any black holes in our solar system and if so what damage have they caused.

    Asked by Savage Sailor 15 to Hannah on 6 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 6 Nov 2017:


      Hello!
      Black holes are actually not that dangerous from a distance. Black holes are really dense, but you have to be close to get sucked in. If the Sun could be turned into a black hole, then it would still have the same mass, but squashed into a diameter of about 4 miles! And the Earth is far enough away that it would actually just keep orbiting as it is now (there just wouldn’t be any light from it!). You have to be quite close to a black hole in order to get sucked in – at a point called the “event horizon”.
      So as far as we know there are no black holes in the solar system, but it’s possible that there are very small ones we don’t know about, and they don’t make any effects we have seen.

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