The Closest Black Hole Isn't as Far as You'd Like

My takeaway is that I need several coordinated science teams to locate the socks missing from my laundry. Detecting gravitational lensing alone won't work.

I found about twenty socks under my bed and more pushed under the couch. The dog steals them and chews them in half, and then hides the remains. Brand new socks preferred.

I miss scishow space. Reid makes videos interesting as he has a certain way of saying things with excitement and intrigue

The sun could be a black hole and it wouldn't "suck" us in. We'd just continue orbiting it. Mass is mass is mass.

the closest black hole is much further away than I'd like

Black holes aren't really that scary. At a distance, they only have gravitational effects similar to that of a normal star.

You're right. I'd like it to be much closer, actually.

You should do a collab with Dr Becky sometime, she's an astrophysicist out of the UK and a great presenter on black holes/astronomical objects. She just put out a video on the mass gap between stellar mass and supermassive black holes that is really interesting 🌟

"It's not even in our solar system" is not the reassurance I was hoping for.

intro "huge black hole" outro "mini black hole"

Fun fact: based on star formation models and the relative frequency of black hole-forming stars, the closest black hole is probably only something around 35 light years away or so. Not that there's any way we could possibly detect it any time soon, but we know that something is probably there. The statistical chance of no black holes being within 50 LY of us is only 13%, and only 0.03% for 80 LY. (source: I led a small team doing a population study of the solar neighborhood to estimate how common neutron stars and black holes are.)

Given how hard dormant black holes are to spot, the surprise isn’t that there’s one close to us, it’s that we identified one close to us.

It is really hard to fall into a black hole, you are more likely to just orbit it. Just like we orbit the giant thermonuclear explosion at only a few light minutes away.

Everyone gangsta when Gaia BH1 starts hurdlinh towards the Oort Cloud

Considering the true vastness of space, 1500 ly is basically nothing, so you're right. It's way closer than I'd like. It's even worse when you realize there's probably smaller closer harder to see ones...

The title of this video shows just how little you folks at SciShow know about me. I would have chosen 'The Closest Black Hole Isn't as CLOSE as You'd Like', since I'd love to have a little one lurking in a stable orbit out somewhere around Neptune, so we could shoot stuff into it and watch the fireworks. When Reid started talking about dormant black holes and how hard they are to detect, I thought you might be about to tell us that my hope was a possibility. You didn't, but what you did say doesn't rule it out, either. So... thanks!

A black hole with mass equal to the particles involved in even the most powerful excelerator collision would have a radius so tiny that it would be nearly a plank length and would evaporate extremely quick. The energetic particles produced in the resulting explosion might be destructive locally but the planet would be just fine.

Dr Becky brought this week maybe the first intermediate black hole is found now, the first of its kind ? We are missing all Types between stellar (small) and Ultramassiv (very large) so far.

Black holes are not so dangerous as they look like. They are not vacuum cleaners. Their gravity is the same as a gravity of a star (of the same mass).

So what was found in HR6819 instead???