Sucked into a Black Hole?

From scientific idea to steering clear of destruction in space travel.

Once the black hole is done destroying the whole planet, the debris would orbit around the black hole before being sucked in and turning into ionized gas (gas consisting of atoms or molecules that have lost or gained electrons).

When you think of a black hole, your mind might come to a futuristic space mission diverted by some imperceptible and mysterious force into which its victim gets sucked in and disappears. But how do black holes suck in everything, even light itself?

“If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow,” says Heino Falcke, chair of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council. A black hole is first created when a giant star reaches the end of its lifetime and implodes. Black holes take matter from the dead star and expand more and more when they suck in new things. The bigger black holes are, the bigger their zone of “no return.”

The gravitational pull caused by a black hole is what pulls objects in. “Black holes are made of matter packed so tightly that gravity overwhelms all other forces,” says Louise Lerner, News Officer for Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. This process is that zone of no return  called the event horizon. Nothing can get away and the matter gets smaller down the black hole, turning into a very small point where time stops.

Now the fun part. What happens if our planet gets sucked into a black hole? Jonathan Zrake, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson University, tells us what might happen if earth was victim to a black hole: "The atmosphere and oceans would be stripped from the Earth's surface, and molten metal would pour from the earth's mantle into space."

Once the black hole is done destroying the whole planet, the debris would orbit around the black hole before being sucked in and turning into ionized gas (gas consisting of atoms or molecules that have lost or gained electrons). The gas would orbit the black hole again in a ring known as the accretion disk, which gets eaten within a few hours or days.

Why is it important for scientists to study black holes? Black holes are laboratories for testing theories that explain how the universe works on large and small scales.

Learning more about black holes now gets us ready for the future where space travel is more common and where flyers need to know basic things about space. Someday, black holes could be seen more frequently in space travel and knowing about it now can prevent future space calamities.

Take the first black hole discovery,  Cygnus X-1, for example. Discovered as recently as 1964 in the US Naval Lab, Cygnus X-1 taught us that dark matter existed and proved many important scientific ideas, such as the general theory of relativity, which is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. If you had the choice to travel to space in the future, would you be worried about black holes?