5 ms·
If a black hole is just constantly eating up surrounding matter and growing, why haven't we gotten sucked up by one yet?
by artursapek 4y ago
If a black hole is just constantly eating up surrounding matter and growing, why haven't we gotten sucked up by one yet?
- sdfghswe 4y agoBecause space is very big.
- trilbyglens 4y agobecause space is facking huge.
- prottog 4y agoEstimates are an average of six protons per cubic meter of space. A whole lot of nothing!
- daveslash 4y ago"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
- phailhaus 4y agoBlack holes don't "suck", they have gravity like anything else. If you replaced the Sun with a black hole of the same mass, all the planets would continue in their orbits.
- Rooster61 4y agoI'd imagine there would be at least some deviance from their current orbits. The sun experiences tidal forces, just like any other body, and the distance between each planet and the closest/furthest atoms of the black hole would be different than that of the sun. Not sure how much different the orbits would be, but they would certainly be different to some degree.
- artursapek 4y agoWe'd all be dead anyway so who cares
- svachalek 4y agoThe point is, the planets would keep orbiting and not go plunging into the black hole due to its incredible gravitational power, as some might picture.
- p1mrx 4y agoThe radius of a 30 billion solar mass black hole is still less than 1% of a light year. For comparison, the nearest star \{Sol} is about 4 light years away.
- snozolli 4y agoFor comparison, the nearest star \{Sol} is about 4 light years away. I'm completely confused by this sentence.
- qbrass 4y ago\ = not. {Sol} = The Sun.
- snozolli 4y agoSo, the nearest star relative to what? Our sun? The black hole?
- fknorangesite 4y agoI think from context it's pretty safe to assume "to us". Especially since the nearest star to us, Proxima Centuri, is indeed about 4ly away.
- fknorangesite 4y agoThey're saying the "nearest star other than the Sun", but with some geek-in-group-signalling with the "not" syntax and referring to the Sun as "Sol", which some science fiction writers (and some non-English languages, of course) use as the Sun's name.