What would happen if a black hole eats the sun?
It’s about as old as the Universe and as big as 34 billion Suns. Stars are eaten for breakfast. And now it’s going to eat our own. Behold, with the catchy name J2157, the wide and strong black hole.
If it were sufficiently close to our solar system, how easily will it kill us? How does all this go sideways into our Sun? And how exactly can this monstrous black hole bring an end to Earth’s entire life?
Black holes are unsettling enough. They form when big stars erupt in a supernova, and then collapse on their own. The stellar ones, the most common black holes, are just 16 km (9.94 mi) in diameter. Yet they’re at least ten times as huge as the mass of a star as our Sun is packed into them.
All the mass packed into such a small diameter makes it highly dense for black holes. If you were too close to the vicinity of a black hole, beyond its event horizon, its intense gravitational force will turn you into a noodle of spaghetti.
But there are such huge black holes that they make stellar black holes look featherlight. They’re titled supermassive black holes. At the cores of galaxies, these monstrosities lurk and take up space about the size of our Solar System. Yet most of them aren’t even similar to the size of the J2157 black hole.
In the known Universe, J2157 is the fastest-growing black hole, and it is the second largest. Its event horizon has an astronomical unit radius of 670, which is equal to the distance multiplied by 22 between the Sun and Neptune.
If that’s not frightening enough, J2157 carries the honor of the hungriest black hole that we know of. It gobbles up the matter at a rate of about one sun per day to stay in good condition. Take this monstrosity now, and bring it nearer to our solar system. How it will turn out, you might imagine.
If J2157 could replace, for us on Earth, the supermassive black hole at the core of our Milky Way galaxy, it will appear ten times brighter than the full Moon.
