Human ignorance, sadly, isn't limited to planet Earth. Even today, over 400 years after the Age of Enlightenment began, plenty of people are still getting plenty of stuff wrong--not just about our home planet, but about the whole universe. Luckily, Jeopardy!s Ken Jennings is the author of a new book about the mysteries of the cosmos, the Junior Genius Guide to Outer Space. In this month's Debunker columns, he'll set us straight on a whole sky full of starry slip-ups. These are some misconceptions of truly astronomical proportion.
The Debunker: Star Myth #2: Do Black Holes Suck?
Let's get this out of the way up front: falling into a black hole is no picnic. Get too close to one of these collapsed stars, and you'll never get out. Weird time effects will start to boggle your brain: thousands of years will pass by in, from your point of view, minutes. You'll see images from the past lined up in front of you, and images from the future behind you. Light will bend so much that might be able to see the back of your own head. And that's before you even start to undergo "spaghettification"--the gravitational stretching of your body into a new, pasta-shaped you.
But in the popular imagination, black holes are even more ominous than that: they are interstellar vacuum cleaners, actively sucking matter and energy alike into their hungry, gaping maws. Here's the truth: a black hole has exact the same attractive power as any other object of the same mass. True, its mass is incredibly dense--imagine a star much huger and heavier than our Sun packed down so it fits on the island of Manhattan. But that's all it is. The "sucking" power of a black hole is just regular gravity.
To put it another way: if our Sun suddenly got collapsed into a black hole (through the freak natural phenomenon or super-villain of your choice) we wouldn't get sucked into it. The Solar System would continue to orbit it normally, because gravity is just a function of mass and distance, and that would all remain unchanged. (The lights would go out and we'd all die, of course, but I'm not interested in details here.) To actually begin your inexorable fall into this new black hole, you'd have to be incredibly close, about six miles or so. Look, there are a lot of things that suck when you're just six miles from them. Take Houston, for example.
Quick Quiz: A peaceful suburb is swallowed up by a black hole in the music video for what band's 1994 hit "Black Hole Sun"?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.