• Question: Is there ever going to be a possibility of a planet being swallowed by a black hole?

    Asked by kezzcop to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Amy Tyndall

      Amy Tyndall answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I don’t think this is a possibility – if a planet is close enough that it can be swallowed by a black hole, then technically it shouldn’t exist in the first place! Black holes are basically regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape its grip (hence the name), and so this would mean that the gravity would be far too strong for a planet to form in the first place – all of the material would be crushed before it could form a nice sphere.

      I guess the only way that a planet COULD be swallowed up by a black hole is if it gets knocked out of orbit from around its sun by some catastrophic event, that means that it eventually ends up in its path… But again, the chances of the planet being able to make it to the black hole without interacting with something else that would stop its travels is probably very, very slim!

    • Photo: Grant Kennedy

      Grant Kennedy answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      I think it’s possible that some planets are swallowed by black holes, but not ones like Earth since we’re a very long way away from the nearest black hole that we know about, which is at the center of our Galaxy (the Milky Way). We have other things like global warming to worry about for now anyway!

      If you look at a picture of our Galaxy (thanks google images)
      https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=milky+way&hl=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X
      you’ll see that is gets brighter and brighter closer to the centre. That’s because there are more and more stars there. Now these stars could have planets just like our Sun, and some of them could fall onto the massive black hole taking their planets with them.

      Another possibility is that closer to the centre of the Milky Way, the stars are a lot closer together, so have close encounters with each other more often. Imagine another star whizzing through the Solar System, it would scatter the planets off in all directions, and they could leave the Solar System forever! So if this kind of thing happened near the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, the planets that get scattered around might also fall onto the black hole.

      g

    • Photo: Shawn Domagal-Goldman

      Shawn Domagal-Goldman answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I agree with Amy and Grant. This is probably not going to happen to Earth, or to any planets near us. But it almost certainly happens to some other planets. Most stars – and maybe ALL stars – seem to have planets. And some of those stars get swallowed by black holes. When they get swallowed, their planets will get gobbled up with them.

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