• Question: do you know how far the nearest black hole to our home planet is?

    Asked by anon-193409 to Morwenna, Jamal, iainstaniland, Heidi, Emma, Carl on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Iain Staniland

      Iain Staniland answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Great question!
      I had to google it but it seems it is closer than we thought the black hole
      “The closest to Earth is V616 Monocerotis, which is 3,000 light-years away and nine to 13 times the mass of the Sun. ”
      Fortunately it is too far away to suck us in. You would have thought they could have given it a better name!

    • Photo: Emma Crawford

      Emma Crawford answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      A0620-00 B, a compact object that is almost certainly a black hole, is approximately 2800 light years from Earth. It is believed to be the closest black hole.

    • Photo: Heidi Gardner

      Heidi Gardner answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Pretty far! There’s a list of the nearest black holes to Earth here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_black_holes
      Like both Emma and Iain said, the closest one to us is A0620-00, also referred to as V616 Mon, and it’s 2800 light years away. To put that into perspective, our nearest star aside from the Sun – Proxima Centauri – is about 4.24 light years away. Basically, we have no danger of being sucked into a black hole anytime soon 🙂

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