Black Holes… These monstrous and seemingly voids of black space suck in everything that gets too close to them; space dust, asteroids, planets, and even entire stars. The nearest one is 1,600 light-years from us. And in the region of the Universe visible from the Earth, there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Each one has around 100 million stellar-mass black holes in the center, ready to devour anything that gets close enough to its event horizon. But what would happen if all the black holes in the universe collided? Keep watching to find out.
We can’t see them, and some say they might not even exist, but we know that something is there from the behavior of stars that orbit these strange phenomena. Black holes lie at the center of almost every known galaxy. Some of them are active, devouring the galaxy that surrounds it, and some are dormant. The ones that are feeding shoot out massive jets of ionized matter close to the speed of light. These are the brightest objects in the universe, and they are also the largest.
Some black holes are so big that it’s almost impossible to comprehend their size. The largest one ever found is 17 billion times the size of our sun. Everything in the Milky Way galaxy, including us, is orbiting a mostly dormant supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A. This massive giant is 4.1 million times the mass of our Sun. It’s 26,000 light-years away from us, and right now as we speak, it’s tearing apart entire star systems and eating five times the mass of the moon every year. That doesn’t sound like very much, and it’s not because Sagittarius A is now a sleeping giant that could awaken if another black hole collided with it.
We’re always learning something new about this phenomenon. Some people think that a black hole just sits where it’s at and doesn’t move, but you might be shocked to learn that’s not true. Recently a black hole was spotted in space by the Hubble telescope, it’s large bright ring of gas shining through the darkness of space, and even more surprising, it was moving. For some reason, this black hole was evicted from the center of its galaxy and right now its blasting through space at 1300 miles per second, about 2000 kilometers per second. What that means is there is a rogue black hole flying through space that is estimated to be 1 billion times more massive than our sun. It would take something massive to push this black hole from the center of its galaxy and into space at such speed… another black hole.
Black holes aren’t usually traveling through space looking for something to eat. But we now know it’s possible that somewhere from space, a rogue black hole could be heading towards our galaxy, and the collision would be epic on a cosmic scale.
There are so many black holes in the universe that it is impossible to count them, and there are even more we have not discovered.
If all of the known black holes were to collide together, it would be the end of the universe as we know it. Some of these stellar giants would be so massive that they would easily swallow smaller ones, and become even larger. And if these black holes were like ours and the ones inside the Andromeda galaxy, then you could imagine the incredible cosmic cataclysm if they all collided at once, perhaps creating a black hole so massive that it would suck in the entire universe. Entire stars would be stripped and sucked inside, planets ripped apart, collisions of planets and stars, those star collisions possibly creating more black holes. It would be a chain of cosmic destruction.
