A Black Hole in Our Solar System

How a monster might be lurking at the edges

An artist’s impression shows the spectacle a gas giant like Jupiter would become if consumed by a black hole. Image by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

There are only gentle signs at first. The outer planets would careen off their usual orbits and on Earth we’d notice the night sky is threaded with the metallic glint of more and more comets as the days go on. The comets have been torn out of their silent beds in the Oort cloud, sent towards the belly of the Solar System where they might strike any planet and rend gaping craters on the rocky surfaces. A black hole moving fast enough will be unaffected by the sun’s gravity and will leave without much more damage than that. But if the sun — that massive gold jewel that makes up the majority of our Solar System’s mass — attracts the black hole, a devastating story begins to unfold.

Lunar and planetary orbits deform into wild, tangled paths with the approach of the black hole. Gravitational effects change the landscape all around us with the Earth quite literally parting in extreme earthquakes and the molten fire of volcanic eruptions. Seasons become extreme as our path around the sun grows closer or further away. The tides shift; we are bound to our home planet which could be sent into the sun to burn. Otherwise the Earth might be pushed into the empty, exotic darkness of the cosmos where our fate will be a stony and suffocating freeze without the heat of our star. Jupiter — larger than the…