Do you know what will happen if the Sun turns into a black hole?

It is difficult to argue with the fact that the Sun is extremely useful. It gives us light, heat, keeps water in a liquid state, and helps plants to photosynthesize. It would be extremely sad if something happened to our star - for example, it would turn into a black hole.

Strictly speaking, in reality, the Sun cannot become it can notbecause it's not heavy enough. So, the mass of the smallest known black hole is equal to 3.66–4.97 masses of our star. In theory, there may be options that weigh even less - as little as 2.7 Suns. But astronomers have not yet seen them in their radio telescopes.

That is, the Sun must be at least 2.7 times heavier to become a black hole. And still, it is not certain that he will succeed.

However, we have not only turned the Sun into a black hole, but also generally lost him and also flew via Jupiter, experimented over the moon - so why refuse new experiments?

So, the star took and turned into a black hole of a similar mass - how will this affect our lives?

Well, the first 8 minutes, or, more precisely, 499 seconds, we won't notice at all that something has happened, since the light reaches the Earth with a delay. And then the Sun will simply disappear, and eternal night will come - only distant stars will illuminate the sky. They will be visible around the clock, which, you see, will greatly facilitate astronomical observations.

Perhaps you can imagine how a beautiful huge black hole will appear in the sky like Gargantua from Interstellar or Sagittarius A * from the center of our Galaxy, which in 2022 photographed astronomers at the European Southern Observatory.

But no. These are all supermassive objects surrounded by large accretion disks of matter falling into them. A hole formed from the Sun will have radius only 3 kilometers. You can't even see it through a telescope.

In addition, our new center of the system simply has nowhere to take matter for absorption and formation of an accretion disk: no other stars and nebulaethat can be absorbed is not nearby. And consequently, the hole will be dark, inconspicuous and will not be able to boast of beautiful orange special effects.

But don't worry, this transformation has a lot of advantages.

Earth and all other planets will in the same way to rotate around our hole, as they do it now. After all, its mass will not change, and, consequently, the gravitational effect will remain the same.

Black holes are stable and live for a very long time. No, in theory they gradually lose mass and disappear - this is called Hawking radiation. But this process is not fast, and we can no longer be afraid that in 3 billion years the Sun will boil oceans, and after 5 billion it will turn into a red giant and swallow the Earth.

McGill University in Montreal calculated the time of evaporation by Hawking radiation for a hole of mass from the Sun is 10⁶⁷ years. And this, as you can see, is much more than age. Universe.

So our new system will continue to cut circles for itself for an extremely long time, and the planets will not collide with each other.

There are, however, this course of events and some minor drawbacks. So, due to the lack of sunlight, civilization will have to move underground, closer to the core, build ultra-efficient nuclear reactors and melt drinking water using artificial heating. Such a technological challenge will give an unprecedented impetus to the development of science.

Well, or we'll all freeze and die.