Could the Earth be swallowed by A Black Hole?

From asteroids capable of eliminating entire species to the supernova that could demolish life on Earth, Space has no shortage of forces and factors that could wreak havoc on our planet. But there is something in space that is more terrifying than asteroids or supernova, something that could wipe out everything within its reach

Could the Earth be swallowed by a Black Hole?

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A black hole is an object so dense that space and time around it are inescapably modified, Bend or warped into an infinite sink. Nothing, not even Light, can move fast enough to escape a black hole’s gravitational pull once it passes a certain boundary, known as an event horizon. Thus a black hole is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner with infinite capacity, gobbling up everything in its path, letting nothing out.

  To determine whether a black hole could swallow the Earth, we first should understand different aspects of black holes. Fortunately, we’re able to observe their effect on the space around them. When matter approaches a black hole, the immense gravitational field accelerated it to high speed. This emits an enormous amount of light. And for objects too far away to be sucked in, the massive gravitational force still affects their orbit. If we observe several stars orbiting around an apparently empty point, a black hole could be leading this.

Most of the black holes that homo-sapiens have found can be thought of as of two main types:

1)      The smaller ones

called stellar mass black holes, they have a mass up to 100 times larger than that of our sun. They’re formed when a massive star consumes all its nuclear fuel and its core collapses. Astronomers have observed several of these objects as close as 3000 light years away from our solar system, another thing we should consider is that they move from one position to another in space, and there could be 100 million small black holes just in the Milky Way. So should we be worried, probably not? Despite their large mass, stellar black holes only have a radius of around 300 km or less, making the chances of a direct hit with us minuscule. Although stellar black hole’s gravitational fields can affect a planet from a large distance. If a typical stellar-mass black hole were to pass in the region of Neptune the orbit of the Earth would be considerably affected because of modification in our Solar System, with the dire result. Still, considering how small they are when compared to our vast galaxy stellar black holes don’t worry as much.

But we still have to meet with the Second type:

2)      Supper massive Black holes, these have masses millions or billions times greater than that of our sun. These giants have grown to immense proportions by swallowing matter and merging with other black holes. Unlike stellar they don’t wander through space, instead they lie at the center of the Galaxies, our own galaxy also resides around a massive black hole which is at its center and our solar system is at a safe distance of 25000 light years, but that could change if our galaxy collides with another galaxy, the Earth could be thrown towards the galactic center, close enough to massive black hole, by which Earth could be swallowed up. In fact, a collision with the Andromeda galaxy is predicted to happen, 4 billion years from now.

Black hole could be the reason for the extinction of Planet Earth but the probability is minuscule but not zero, whatever may happen in the future, presently we are safe from black holes.