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GregroxMun

Black Hole Headed For Earth

May 29th, 2018
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  1. We’ll assume it’s a stellar mass black hole of 5 solar masses. And it’s headed directly towards the Earth, as in, the event horizon of the black hole is aimed at the center of the planet. The Earth won’t survive.
  2. One hundred and twenty years is a lot of time, probably enough to ensure the survival of the species, assuming the nations of the world don’t act stupidly short-sighted and monogenerational. (120 years is more than enough for a climate change apocalypse to have happened, but being such a gradual change and one that isn’t human-extinction-level, it isn’t nearly as important a topic for lawmakers apparently.) We’ll assume that the world is genuinely working towards an escape plan.
  3. I’ve run some simulations in *Universe Sandbox 2*, an N-body gravitational simulator, to see what a flyby of a stellar mass black hole would do to it. Naturally, astronomers will be doing the same thing in their scenario too.
  4. The flyby of the black hole will cause the Earth to be destroyed completely, bits of it flung every which way across the solar system. The Moon escapes, but it’s flung out at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Mercury is largely unaffected at first, while Mars and Venus are drastically changed.
  5. Mars is now in a lower, eccentric orbit. Before its orbit was at 1.5 au (1 au = Earth-Sun distance). Now it’s at an average of 1.3 au. Its periapsis is 0.847au, stretching to near where Venus used to orbit. Its apoapsis is at 1.75 au. This puts it in the cooler limits of the habitable zone, though it does get extra toasty in the short orbital summer before cooling down during a long orbital winte
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