What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole?
Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime.
One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is this: in the absence of any other forces or interactions, if you start with any initial configuration of gravitationally bound masses at rest, they will inevitably collapse to form a black hole. A straightforward prediction of Einstein’s equations, it was Roger Penrose’s Nobel-winning work that not only demonstrated that black holes could realistically form in our Universe, but showed us how.
As it turns out, gravity doesn’t need to be the only force: just the dominant one. As the matter collapses, it crosses a critical threshold for the amount of mass within a certain volume, leading to the formation of an event horizon. Eventually, some time later, any object at rest — no matter how far away from the event horizon it initially was — will cross that horizon and encounter the central singularity.
If, somehow, the electromagnetic and quantum forces holding the Earth up against gravitational collapse were turned off, Earth would quickly become a black hole. Here’s what we would experience if that were to happen.
