The black holes are the scientists and science fiction lovers’ worst fear. Nothing can escape the gravitational pull from the void, but it doesn’t mean they will consume the universe eventually. The scientific community believes there is a supermassive black hole at the heart of every galaxy, and they have billions of times more mass than ours. In the Milky Way, Sagittarius A is our cosmic devourer, but these monsters eat material slowly.
Black holes can absorb most matter till the end of time
The universe is filled and surrounded by black holes, but a single one is not enough to end life as we know it – especially because the nearest one is 1,560 light-years away from our solar system. The Gaia B1 is not moving towards us, and Earth is not moving in its direction. The relative position of the Earth and Gaia changes, but it would still take 1,600 years traveling at the speed of light for it to get close to each other.
It’s not safe to say that black holes won’t consume everything, but that depends on how the universe changes in the future. If it keeps expanding fast like it is right now, then it will have plenty of time left on Earth before it gets devoured by the nearest one. But if suddenly it stops expanding, and it starts to shrink, then we are in serious trouble. In 2023, a trio of scientists theorized that other objects can evaporate via Hawking radiation, a theoretical phenomenon happening near the event horizon.
The process of evaporation via Hawking’s radiation
Hawking’s radiation is the process that happens to a black hole when particles escape from its edge, which leads the gravitational singularity to lose mass and, eventually, disappear. Until the moment comes, the planet is safe, but the new theory argues that other dense cosmic objects might also evaporate through a similar process, like white dwarfs and neutron stars.
The white dwarfs are a small, dense stars with the size of a planet, and a neutron star is created when a supernova explodes. The three researchers—Heino Falcke, Michael Wondrak, and Walter van Suijlekom—say that this event can happen because of something the gravitational pair production, where particles form strong gravitational fields and escape to outer space, causing a “leak” from the black hole and making slowly evaporate.
The end of the Earth is closer than before
The team argues that objects with strong gravitational fields will evaporate and turn into particles, and this could happen to Earth in 10⁹⁰ years (a 1 followed by 90 zeroes), longer than the universe has left (10^78), a couple of years earlier than the scientists predicted previously when they estimated 10^101 years left.
In 2002, the biologist Edward Osborne Wilson predicted in the book “In The Future of Life” that half of the Earth’s life forms could be extinct by 2100. Other studies point out that climate change until 2050 will cause more than a third of the animal and plant species to face extinction, and 70% by the end of the century.
Countdown to destruction
Even though Hawking’s radiation might take away mass from the black holes, the heaviest supermassive cosmic object closer to Earth, the Sagittarius A, has 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, and it is currently 26,000 light-years away from us, which means there’s more probability of the star near us that heats the planet would consume everything, and this is set to happen in five billion years.
If humans can expand life beyond the solar system before the next massive extinction event, it would still have all these years to leave. Currently, astronauts can barely leave the Earth’s atmosphere.