During my experience in several science related forums, I had find several things that seems to be scientific but actually are no more than myths. As experienced members of these forums often say, the demon is always in the detail. Simple stories used to explain the basic concepts to new students are just simple stories. In order to get the right picture about what actually happening, we will need to go to the detail and do the maths.

In this article I will list several misconceptions often found in science related forums. Everyone is newbie in the past, so some of these misconceptions are of my own.

Black hole entering our solar system will suck everything into its event horizon

This is a very common misconception. This is partially caused by how most ( if not all ) basic literature about black hole picture them. While these literature are correct about the fact that a black hole do exert a great gravitational attraction on any mass around them, the belief that a black hole will suck everything into inside its event horizon is incorrect.

We have to remember that black holes are something with very high density of mass. Therefore for the equal number of mass, they are going to have smaller size than objects made of ordinary matter. A black hole with mass equal to 100 suns have Schwarzchild radius less than that of moon. That size is meaningless compared to the vast interplanetary distance of our own solar system.

A 100 solar-mass black hole entering our solar system will have very small probability to suck any major bodies within the solar system into its event horizon. It is like trying to collect several marbles in a bottle using a typhoon while the marbles are scattered randomly in a region as big as India. In other word, it is very unlikely.

However, this doesn’t mean that a 100 solar-mass black hole entering our solar system is not going to result in any catastrophic event. The black hole will exert gravitational attraction enough to disrupt the orbit of some major objects within the solar system. However the exact effect are going to vary depending on where the black hole pass the plane of our solar system and where the planets are at that moment.

In the case shown above for example, a 100 solar-mass black hole passing between the orbit of Mars and Earth at 60 km/second is going to disrupt the orbit of all objects like the graph shown above. Earth (pink) is not going to be sucked into the black hole’s event horizon, but it is going to be stolen away from the Sun. Earth is going to orbit the black hole in a very eccentric orbit.

If the same black hole pass the solar system between the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn, the result is going to be different. The result however is stranger. Sun and Mercury is going to orbit the black hole, while Earth and Mars are going to orbit the Sun in highly eccentric orbit. The outer planet is going to orbit the barycenter of Sun-Black Hole binary.

Regardless of the fact that earth was not sucked into the event horizon of the black hole, earth is going to experience a major climate change. This major climate change will have destructive effect on its biosphere. So even if a black hole passing our solar system is not going to suck everything into its event horizon, 100 solar-mass black hole is not something to trifle with. The result to humanity would still be as deadly.

My other science and mathematics articles :

• What Could Robots Do at This Moment?
• Do Heliocentrism Means That the Sun is Stationary?
• Can Black Holes Move or Do They Just Stay at Their Position?
• Image of Four Dimensional Objects
• Is it possible for a mathematics equation to be cute?