Negative. The nearest black hole is believed to be in the V616 Monocerotis system, roughly 3,000 light years away.
The farthest that humans have travelled is to the moon. The black hole is 73,833,468,262 times more distant than the moon. At the velocity of the Apollo capsules it would take 80,472,276 years to reach that black hole.
If the dinosaurs had an astro program and sent an astronaut in the direction of that black hole, then he or she might well be just arriving there today.
The singularity is essentially the center of the black hole; it's where matter is drawn in with no possibility of escape.
The rest of what we "see" of a black hole, the accretion disk (the part that emits light), is just the event horizon. In reality, it's ridiculously far from the singularity in human terms. Especially if we're talking about supermassive black holes, where the distance is several million kilometers...
The singularity is of zero size in classical physics, or something relative to the Planck length. But the gravitational pull is so brutal that the accretion disk can be thousands of times the size of a star...
To give you an idea, in a supermassive black hole, the distance between the accretion disk and the singularity would be absurdly greater than the distance between the Earth and the core of the sun.
That's the scale we're talking about...
Without a warning, Earth was enveloped by a beam of intense light from the center of the galaxy. The pole of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* was pointing at our planet. It was the end of human civilization.
People who were outdoors were evaporated immediately, and only a faint shadow of their existence was imprinted on the ground where they stood. Much more horrifying fates awaited people inside the buildings. The hot air evaporated the glass in the windows and entered their rooms. Their skin, exposed to extremely high temperatures, melted to flesh as they experienced enormous pain for a fraction of a second. Fortunately, it didn’t last long; they died quickly. Or maybe not….
We have recently discovered that the axis of rotation of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, is oriented in such a way that we are facing its pole. This is surprising because the planes of the spiral disks of galaxies would tend to align with the equatorial regions of the event horizons of supermassive black holes at their centers.
When these monsters become active by feeding on vast amounts of matter, they can evolve into active galactic nuclei or quasars. A beam of intense radiation can then emerge from their poles that can seriously damage everything in its way. We recently observed one causing nova explosions in the giant elliptical galaxy M87.
Nevertheless, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun and is relatively modest in size compared to the mass of our galaxy and other supermassive black holes elsewhere. We are located 26,000 light-years away from the center, and a significant amount of gas and dust along the way would block some of the radiation. The above scenario could happen in other galaxies, which contain supermassive black holes hundreds of times or more massive than the one we have in the Milky Way.
At most, the Earth’s atmosphere would get seriously damaged, and dark clouds would appear that would block the energy of the sun for years, causing nuclear war-like conditions and famine that could dent the human population to a large extent.
We think that our supermassive black hole has been in its active galactic nucleus phase or quasar many times in the past. In other galaxies, they last millions to even up to a billion years, but their length depends on the sources of matter the supermassive black hole can feed on. It can be from a recent galactic merger. Our galaxy has not collided with a huge one for 8 to 11 billion years since the Gaia-Encaladus-Sausage galaxy increased the number of stars in the Milky Way by about 50 billion.
Perhaps the next quasar phase will occur after the merger with the Andromeda Galaxy and its supermassive black hole, which is 20 to 30 times more massive than our own. This might be in 4.5 billion years or more. This behemoth of a unison between two supermassive black holes could do far more damage, and its galaxy would supply theirs, stir up and move our nebulae that can feed this voracious source of destruction for hundreds of millions or even a billion years.
The question was: How would earth be affected if the super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy turned into a quasar?
Not only is it possible, it’s theoretically one of the most efficient sources of energy out there.
The black hole itself, by which I mean the event horizon and everything inside, is not a great source of energy. It was a famous discovery by the late Stephen Hawking that despite their gravity, all black holes do emit a little radiation from their event horizon, but it isn’t much. In fact, the bigger the black hole, the less power you get.
But if you throw something in to the black hole, then the fun happens. Almost every black hole is spinning very fast, and this effect pulls material approaching it into what’s called an accretion disk:
While spiraling in, the matter will go faster and faster, and wrap more and more tightly, and before it completes the descent it will start feeling intense friction against itself. Basically, it will give itself a rug burn.
(We’ve only seen this effect happen with gas from stars, but I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t happen with anything you toss in.)
All that friction turns to heat, then to radiation. This radiation takes the form of X-rays, blasting out perpendicular to the disk:
This is such an intense effect that a lot of the gas falling in will actually disappear. Mass is energy, and energy must come from somewhere. E = mc^2. In this case, a large portion of the mass directly transmutes into X-rays. The black hole is such a gluttonous eater that a lot of what it eats explodes into light before it can get it into its mouth.
This has an absolutely insane matter → energy conversion process. For reference: the only power source we currently have that directly converts matter to energy is nuclear power, which scrapes 0.1%, a mere pittance, of the mass of U235 into energy as it splits apart. The sun’s nuclear fusion is a bit more efficient, converting 0.7% of the mass of its hydrogen into various kinds of light, the other 99.3% settling into helium.
The conversion rate of accretion disk of a black hole can be up 40% .
Forty percent!
One kilogram (~2.2 pounds) of matter converted 40% of the way into energy would yield 36 petajoules, or 10 terawatt-hours. That’s enough to power the entire world for half an hour. A metric ton could power it for three weeks.
So, the potential is there. Now we just need a way to get there :-)
The whole funnel thing is lazy illustration. It’s a convenient way to show “really deep gravity well” by dropping the funnel off the bottom of the illustration.
When a large mass bends spacetime it’s actually more like this - but it’s a lot harder to depict “really deep well” this way.
Now, imagine all those lines being bent even more the closer they would pass by the center. You may *think* “but they’ll come out the other side” - but that’s only true if you’re stuck in a flat Euclidean 3D space like we evolved to live in.
The gravity field around a black hole is so strong that distance doesn’t behave like you expect - even if you bend those lines in the picture 3 or 4 or 10 times further towards the center, they still won’t stick out the other side - they won’t even reach the center. You draw a new line closer than the ones in the grid in the picture, and you bend it more and it still doesn’t reach the center. Draw one close enough, and you need to bend to (nearly) infinity to reach the center…
Fortunately, the event horizon shields us from the *real* weirdness inside…
Some of the other answers have the recent imaging of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. The actual hole isn’t visible, of course. What you see is the radio waves from the area just outside the event horizon. Why did they image a distant black hole and not the one in our own galaxy? Partly because M87 is actively chowing down on stuff that’s falling into it, and the accretion disk is emitting all sorts of light - everything from radio waves to gamma rays. Meanwhile, our own galaxy’s central black hole is relatively quiet, because it’s already chowed down everything that passes too close to it, so it’s relatively quiet compared to M87.
Stars with mass more than 150 Solar Masses are believed to be unstable. The radiation pressure from the core would be so high that it would shed the outer layers of the star eventually leading to loss of mass.
Sagitarius A* weighs around 4 Million Solar Masses.
So in order for it to be a star before becoming a Super Massive Black Hole, it would have to be a star with less than 150 Solar Masses, become a blackhole (in a process which anyways sheds a lot of mass) & then grow from there to acquire a mass of 4 Mn Solar Masses.
Frankly this process would need a LOT more time than the age of the universe. So it could not be a star before becoming a black hole.
Blackholes this big are formed by either of the following three processes:
Yeah.. that sets the tone for a 100km diameter blackhole. It would have a mass of about 34 times the mass of the Sun. It would be classified as a stellar-mass black hole. Currently the most massive Stellar-mass BH we know in our galaxy is Gaia BH3 with about 32x solar mass, but of course, in our scenario, our BH tops the rank of stellar-mass BHs.
It would definetly disrupt our solar system, possibly causing every object here to fall into it or get ejected into outer space.. and might even disrupt the path of other star systems.
Though honestly, it is still nothing compared to the blackholes found in the centure of galaxies, called Supermassive blackholes such as our milky way’s known as Sagittarius A*. It has a mass of 4.1 MILLION times the mass of our sun and has a radius of 12 MILLION KILOMETER. They are in a league of their own, both technically and figuratively.
Mind boggling numbers huh…
Quasar is massive luminous object in space that resides supermassive black hole in it's centre. It emits electromagnetic radiation and accreting materials into it. It is found at the core of galaxy. Its masses million to billion of solar masses.
Other hand, black hole is defined by its event horizon, singularity and an Accretion disc. Black hole can be of stellar massive, super massive and tiny size.
Neutron star is remnant death of star having solar masses 1–2 units. It composes neutrons only.Neutron stars rotate rapidly.
A black hole is not really a "hole".
A black hole is a celestial body left over from a giant star that has died where its gravity becomes so great that the curvature of space is very steep, resulting in no matter whatsoever being able to escape its gravity when it gets too close, even light.
Black holes are not like this:
Or this.
A black hole is more like this:
Or like this:
So, instead of a hole, a black hole is a black, three-dimensional object with extraordinary density.
And, if asked "where does a black hole lead" then in this context it is the center of the black hole. What is at the center of a black hole? Experts agree to call this unknown region the singularity .
Previously, black holes had an area called the event horizon, which is the boundary where something is no longer possible to escape from the black hole. In the middle of the boundary in the event horizon is called a singularity, which is a place where mass or density becomes infinite and the curvature of space-time becomes infinite too, because gravity is so strong there.
What happens if someone goes in there?
Gone… and never to return.
At least that's what we expect, because we don't have any data yet on what and how the singularity is filled.