If a black hole 12 inches in diameter were situated (say) 10 metres off the ground, what would happen?  And how long would it take to devour the earth?
111772
This question appeared quite a time ago and was inspired, of course, by all the fuss around "LHC will destroy the Earth".   Consider a small black hole, that is somehow got inside the Earth. Under "small" I mean small enough to not to destroy Earth instantaneously, but large enough to not to evaporate due to the . I need this because I want the black hole to "consume" the Earth. I think reasonable values for the mass would be $10^{15} - 10^{20}$ kilograms.   Also let us suppose that the black hole is at rest relative to the Earth.  The question is: How can one estimate the speed at which the matter would be consumed by the black hole in this circumstances?
22090
The moon orbits Earth at about $380,\!000 \,\mathrm{km}$  away from it, at around $3,600 \,\mathrm{km}$ an hour.  I was thinking, with light traveling at $300,\!000 \,\mathrm{km/s}$, how close to earth (probably in the $\mathrm{nm}$ range is my guess) would light have to be to Earth to orbit it?  Update: After reading the below answers, here's my reasoning to why I thought it would be in the nanometre range.  I thought that if light was as close as possible to Earth (like, a planck length away or something), Earth's gravity would make it hit Earth immediately, but I forgot that the pull of gravity gets weaker when one is further away from Earth (i.e. at the surface of Earth is still somewhat "far away").
30357
A ring of a planet has an inner radius of approximately 52,000 km (measured from the center of the planet) and a radial width of 19 km. Use differentials to estimate the area of the ring. (Round your answer to the nearest thousand.)   I hate asking questions where I have nothing to contribute but I have absolutely no Idea on how to approach this question. A step by step solution to this problem which I could apply to similar problems would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.
18262
Suppose I wanted to travel to one of the recently discovered potentially Earth-like planets such as Kepler 186f that is 490 light years away. Assuming I had a powerful rocket and enough fuel, how long would it take me?
13162
from Earth's surface is 11.2 Kilometres/second.  How long would one need to maintain this escape velocity to actually escape Earth's gravitational pull? Must this 11.2 km/s velocity need to be maintained all the way up to geosynchronous orbit?
17693
My friend and I were reading the news of the discovery of a , and it got us thinking: could there be a blob of liquid water in space the size of, say, a planet?  Just in the interest of curiosity, I want to ask about several scenarios:   Could the water being ejected by that black hole ever condense into something of the size I'm describing? Would it boil over immediately? If it would boil over, supposing the water "planet" could somehow have an atmosphere or maybe even a glass enclosure that keeps the liquid water away from the vacuum, what might happen to the planet as a result of other forces, namely gravity? Would the elements near the middle heat up and maybe fuse? Roughly how large a body of water could you have that's stable given that it could be protected from the vacuum? And just for fun, supposing the body of water was "bootstrapped" with primitive life or the ingredients for it, could it potentially support life?
83290
A black hole is so powerful to suck everything into itself. So is it possible that mini black holes can be created? If not then we could have actively disproved the rumors spread during LHC experiment.
38164
I know that there's no evidence at this point for "white holes" however would it even be mathematically possible for a black hole to be connected to a white hole (total opposite so everything would be expelled, after some really extreme physical conditions)? Maybe with a wormhole connecting them? If this was even possible (if the black hole or connection could actually be created and be stable enough), would that matter be expelled into a different universe, etc? Maybe even a different region of spacetime? Just curious, as it would be a cool idea.
21446
We've heard it many times, nothing can escape the gravity of a black hole, even light once it's past the event horizon.  If this is true, how can a black hole emit anything?  are massive black holes that have consumed enormous amounts of matter and energy, and then blasted it back out into the universe.  How is this possible?  Time stands still in a black hole, that in itself should stop anything from moving.
9916
Excuse me if the question is naïve. I am not a physicist.  Let's imagine formation of a black hole from a homogeneous collapsing star. At certain moment when enough of matter is inside of a small enough spherical area the event horizon starts to exist. When does the singularity start to exist and why?  The matter below the event horizon still continues to collapse towards the centre (e.g. in the reference frame of the falling matter). What are the necessary conditions for the singularity to appear?  I have found two similar questions but the answers did not really explain this problem to me:
17142
I had a recent conversation with my girlfriend, who is a physics grad student. She was kind enough to listen to me rant about an idea concerning escape velocity. Unfortunately, I am still thinking about this question, but don't want to bother her with it.  My thought is that we shouldn't actually need to reach 11km/sec to leave the earth's gravity. Instead of this, can we simply apply enough force to overcome earth's gravity without reaching that speed? How we would do this is not a part of my question.  Orbital altitude is $99$ miles. Travelling $60$ mph straight up should get you there in $1.65$ hours, granted you have enough force to push. I know some of the simpler math like $F=ma$, but that didn't help me understand.  I browsed some articles about space elevators and couldn't find my answer.  Then I thought about a regular elevator and the fact that it has enough force to move it away from the earth successfully. Even if the elevator moved at $1$ nanometer/sec, it would still move away from the Earth, overcoming the minute pull of gravity at that altitude.  If you missed it, my question was:  can we simply apply enough force to overcome Earth's gravity without reaching that speed?  Edit: In another example, let's say we could drive a car from here to low Earth orbit. As long as we had enough torque, we should be able to overcome gravity, much like a pickup truck pulling a bunch of lumber. Is that correct?
5251
I've read a lot of conflicting answers in these forums. However, today saw the awesome announcement of gravitational waves. Two black holes merged:   Not only that, they merged FAST. In 1/5th of a second revolving around each other 250 times a second. The entire event was quicker than a heartbeat. Moreover, we observed this happening as distant outsiders. So now we can say for sure:   Objects approaching the event horizon DO NOT appear to slow down Black holes CAN merge in a finite (and quick) amount of time And all this is wrt a frame of reference far, far away   To quote the NYTimes article:  One of them was 36 times as massive as the sun, the other 29. As they approached the end, at half the speed of light, they were circling each other 250 times a second.  And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time.  However, everything I've read so far has let me to believe that an outside observer should never be able to measure the collision happening in a finite time. So what exactly is happening here? I must have read at lest 5 different versions of this so far everywhere in these forums over the past several years.
25572
By my understanding, if everything doubled in size, such as the Sun and the Earth, and because the space in between them (which is nothing) can't expand, would the gravities greatly change and the Earth be pulled into the Sun?
44177
If I were to stand by a pyramid, which weighs about 20 million tons, I would slow down by a trillion million million million of second. Don't know if that's exactly right, but you get the point. Also, if you went into a black hole, time would stop at the event horizon (as measured by a clock of a distant outside observer). Why is this?
86072
Lets say that there are only two bodies in the universe, 65 kg each. Other than that the universe is completely empty, no neutrons, no photons, no dark energy/matter, not even neutrinos (that is to make things less complicated. If the loss of other things leads to something like the universe exploding like a bubble at the speed of light or something, you can change these parameters. I'm mainly concerned about gravity here). Those two bodies are placed apart from each other at the distance of the observable universe. Will they start moving into each other? Will they collide? (Optional question: If so, with how much speed will they collide?)
103842
Given that space is not a perfect vacuum, what is the speed of sound therein? Google was not very helpful in this regard, as the only answer I found was $300\,{\rm km}\,{\rm s}^{-1}$, from , which is not a source I'd be willing to cite.
2687
I was surprised to only recently notice that      An object of any density can be large enough to fall within its own   Schwarzschild radius.   Of course! It turns out that supermassive black holes at galactic centers can have an average density of less than water's.  Somehow I always operated under the assumption that black holes of any size had to be superdense objects by everyday standards.  Compare the Earth to collapsing into a mere 9mm marble retaining the same mass, in order for the escape velocity at the surface to finally reach that of light.  Or Mt. Everest packed into one nanometer.  Reading on about this , it increases proportionally with total mass.  Assuming matter is accumulated at a steady density into a spherical volume, the volume's radius will only "grow" at a cube root of the total volume and be quickly outpaced by its own gravitational radius.  Question: For an object the , what would have to be its diameter for it to qualify as a black hole (from an external point of view)?  Would this not imply by definition that:   The Earth, Solar system and Milky Way are conceivably inside this black hole? Black holes can be nested/be contained within larger ones? Whether something is a black hole or not is actually a matter of perspective/where the observer is, inside or outside?