9 Science Facts To Make You Sound Clever At Parties

Despite their reputation as the vacuum cleaners of the universe, a black hole under normal circumstances is no more likely to suck you into its inky abyss as it is to perform a tap dance.

In fact, the sun could turn into a black hole right now, and apart from being suddenly plunged into a dark and eternal winter, nothing would change. We would continue to orbit around our obsidian black host at the same distance and speed.

This is because a black hole still has the same mass as the object that formed it, the extraordinary part of it is that this mass is condensed into an infinitesimally small point called a singularity.

This means that objects can happily orbit a black hole for its entire lifespan without being "sucked in" so long as they stay away from the event horizon.

And whilst we're on the subject, black holes don't actually "suck"; seeing as we're talking about gravity here, it makes more sense to talk about falling than sucking.

In the same way that a cliff won't suck you over the edge of it from 10 feet away, a black hole won't suck you into it unless you go "over the edge".