00:00There is a black hole, roughly seven times the mass of our Sun, drifting silently through
00:05our own galaxy, not orbiting anything, not attached to any star, just wandering through
00:10space completely invisible. Astronomers only found it because it briefly paint the light
00:15of a star behind it, and that raises an unsettling question. If one of these rogue black holes
00:20drifted toward our solar system, would we even see it coming, and could we survive it?
00:25Black holes are either ripping material of a companion style and glowing in x-rays,
00:30for they are sitting at the center of a galaxy, feeding on gas and dust.
00:34But a rogue black hole does none of that, it emits no light pools in no invisible material,
00:39and travels to the galaxy completely dark. By the end of this video, you will know exactly
00:44how close the nearest non-black hole actually is, how big these objects can really get,
00:49and what would generally happen to Earth if a rogue one ever got close.
00:53For decades, rogue black holes sounded like pure science fiction, something without any real
00:58evidence. But in 2022, astronomers using the European Space Agency GAIA spacecraft identified
01:04GAIA PH-1, a black hole about ten times the mass of our Sun, setting roughly 1560 light years away
01:12in the constellation of futures. It is dormant, quickly orbited by a sunlight star,
01:17at about the same distance Earth orbits our Sun, making it three times closer than the previous record
01:22holder. That sounds close in cosmic terms, but 1560 light years is still trillions of
01:29miles away, nowhere near a threat. A black hole doesn't need a companion star to exist,
01:34it just needs one to be easy to find. In February 2022, astronomers confirmed something different.
01:40The first-ever isolated rogue black hole, found not by watching it glow, but by watching it warp the
01:46light of a distant star as it passed in front of it. A technique called microlensing. This rogue black hole
01:52sits about 5000 light years away, weighs around seven times the mass of the Sun, and moves through
01:57space at roughly 45 kilometers per second, utterly along with no star, no light, no signature except
02:03gravity itself. If isolated black holes like this exist untethered to any visible companion, there
02:09could be tens of millions of them scattered across the Milky Way that we simply have not detected yet,
02:15each one invisible until it happens to pass in front of something we are watching. So let's talk about the
02:21biggest black hole in the universe, because size matters here too. The current record holder is 618
02:27ton, an ultra-massive black hole with a mass estimated around 66 billion times that of our Sun.
02:33What would happen if a rogue black hole like the one we found in 2022 drifted into our solar system?
02:39You would not need to touch it to be in danger. Its gravity would start disrupting planetary orbits
02:44from light years away, long before it arrived. Closer in tidal forces would begin stretching anything,
02:50nearby into thin streams of matter, a process nicknamed stratification. But here is the reassuring
02:56part, space is almost incomprehensibly empty. Even with millions of rogue black holes theorized to
03:02exist in our galaxy, the odds of one passing anywhere near our solar system in the next few million years
03:08are astronomy charisma. Could we survive a rogue black hole? The honest answer is that we have
03:13have enormous advanced learning, because its gravitational influence would bend starlight
03:18and disturbed distant orbits, years before it got dangerously close. The real danger was never one
03:24is coming for us. It is that these objects are so good at hiding that we have only confirmed the
03:29existence of one in all of human history. And that means our account of what is actually out there
03:34in the dark is almost certainly wrong.
