A black hole crosses the Solar System

A lone black hole of ten Suns passes between Jupiter and Saturn: which planets are lost, what Earth feels, and how likely it is

A what-if: physics allows it on paper, but no one has ever seen one. Everything shown follows the theory as it stands.

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A black hole you cannot see

No one has seen a black hole cross the Solar System. The closest one known, Gaia BH1, is 1,560 light-years away (El-Badry et al., 2023), and the first lone one was found in 2022, 5,000 light-years away, by how its gravity bent the light of a star behind it (Sahu et al., 2022).

Closest approach

The giant planets are another matter. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbit at 5 to 30 AU, as far from the Sun as the black hole is, so its pull on them differs hugely from its pull on the Sun, and that difference is what wrenches an orbit open.

How likely?

Stars do pass by. About 70,000 years ago Scholz's star came within 0.8 light-years, through the outer fringe of the Sun's cloud of comets (Mamajek et al., 2015). A black hole in the same place would have been just as invisible, and just as harmless at that distance.

Objects in this story

• The Sun
• Jupiter
• Cygnus X-1

More simulations

• S301: the fastest known star
• Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hits Jupiter
• The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs
• How a star is born
• Pulsar
• Earth's magnetic shield
• The Sun's death
• A star torn apart
• A massive star explodes
• Type Ia supernova
• How black holes are made
• Two black holes merge
• Two neutron stars collide
• Magnetar
• Quasar
• Gravitational lensing
• The brightest gamma-ray burst
• The Milky Way meets Andromeda
• The Big Bang

What if: ideas no one has observed

• What if the Sun became a black hole?
• False vacuum decay
• What if the Moon disappeared?
• Wormhole
• White hole
• Warp drive
• Dyson swarm
• Hawking evaporation
• Near light speed
• Falling into a black hole