You know the saying “keep your friends close but keep your enemies even closer”? Now, this saying does not work, if we talk about black holes. This is the worst enemies that can only be a person, and that they need to keep as far as possible. We’re talking about regions of space where matter is Packed so tightly that the only way to get out of there — move faster than the speed of light. But as you know, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So clean up will not work.
Go too close to the black hole — and you will be compressed into an infinitesimally small point.
However, you can stay away from the black hole and still suffer. The black hole stretches out the tentacles of their gravity through light years. And if one was close enough to our Solar system, it is wreaking havoc on all of our precious planets.
Planets and even the Sun will blend, collide or even be ejected from the Solar system.
And as we have seen, to destroy the black hole impossible. Everything you try to do with it, just make it bigger, stronger, meaner. It is truly a universal evil. You can only wait billions years, until it evaporates.
If so, it makes sense to find all the black holes around and see if we can evacuate this Solar system in a quick, if required.
Where is the closest black hole?
There are two types of black holes: supermassive black holes at the heart of each galaxy and black holes of stellar mass that formed after the death of massive stars (supernovae).
With supermassive black holes all, by and large, okay. In the center of each galaxy in the Universe there is one such hole. And in the milky Way is, 27 000 light years from us. In Andromeda is 2.5 million light years and so on.
Supermassive black holes are far away and no threat to us do not represent.
But those smaller can be a problem. The fact that black holes do not emit any radiation, they are completely invisible, so it is not so easy to see them in heaven. The only way to know what a black hole is close enough to see how the background light curves. Well, if you already got close enough to see it, you cover.
The nearest known black hole is V616 Monocerotis, also known as V616 Mon. It is located 3,000 light years from us and has 9-13 the mass of the Sun. We know, because it is located in a binary system with a star in palmacci the Sun. Only a black hole can lead to the fact that its binary partner will rotate so fast. Astronomers do not see this black hole, but I know that it’s there, swirling gravitational dance.
Next nearby black hole is the classic Cygnus X-1, located 6,000 light years from us. It is 15 times heavier than the Sun by mass and, again, is part of a binary system.
And the third near the black hole is also in a binary system.
Begin to catch the smell of burning? The reality is that only a small fraction of black holes is in binary system, but so far it’s the only way to detect them. Most likely, there are a lot more black holes, which astronomers have been unable to find.
It all sounds terribly, of course, and now you’ll probably be looking at the sky in anticipation of this eloquent distortion of light from the impending black hole. But such events are incredibly rare.
The solar system has existed for over 4.5 billion years, and all the while the planet felt fine, they were standing. Even if a black hole passed the Solar system a few dozen light years, it would significantly shifted orbit, and life would not exist, so nobody would have noted this fact.
We are not faced with a black hole billions of years and probably won’t run into her yet billions or trillions of years. But how do we know for sure? We don’t know, not hiding around the corner if the black hole is V616 Mon is it really the nearest of them. And may never know. And it’s even good. Why should I worry in vain?