if the sun suddenly became a black hole, how would the earths orbit be affected?
410940
Our Sun's mass isn't great enough to create a black hole, but speaking in a hypothetical situation it would suck everything into including the planets and so forth because its gravitational pull is so great.  However, recent astronomical studies have proven using a spectrometer and examining the data produced by it the stars in almost every single galaxy are moving at a rate which only indicates the presence of a super massive black hole in almost every single galaxy.  The size of the black hole is dependent upon the galaxies size and is directly related to its sigma, but these black holes are present in almost every galaxy we have viewed, including our own and are currently not feeding anymore and are dormant.  They believe that they helped form the galaxy in some way but it is not known yet.  So maybe it is possible if the Sun created a black hole it would feed to the point that it also became dormant, probably not though.
3582
No, the Earth will continue in its orbit around the sun. But as the sun runs out of hydrogen fuel and balloons into a red giant, it will become so huge that Earth will be completely incinerated. Sorry to break it to you.
1166809
our earth would burn due its heat along with the sun's heat
840496
Scientists say that in 5,000,000,000 years, the sun will suddenly expand, probably all the way to Earth's orbit.  Even if it doesn't come this far, we will be fried. Before then, humanity may end, but Earth will still be here.
495476
Thats correct, merely a song. A sun couldnt esist in a black hole. It would be ripped to shreads in seconds!
899150
Barring one of these, http://www.livescience.com/technology/10ways_destroyearth.html in about 5 billion years the sun will have exhausted most of it's hydrogen and will swell up to a red giant, engulfing the earth. As our blackened, burned-out cinder of a planet orbits inside the sun, it will be plowing through solar material, and will gradually spiral into the core, where it will fly apart shortly before impact and be smashed into it's base elements with little fanfare.
847832
Your lungs and all tissue exposed would freeze instantly (space is that cold)... any part of you facing the sun would immediately be bombarded with massive amounts of radiation and burn ... and it would all happen instantly and simultaneously.\n\nBut you wouldn't notice 'cause you'd already be dead.
639829
All a black hole is is a star that exploded and pulled itself together into such a little ball that it's mass desity became nearly infinity, and now the gravity is so great, light gets pulled in a crushed, therefore you cannot see the light, and it appears to be just a black spot.\n\nIf the Earth were to shrink to 6 cm^3 in size, it would also be a "black hole." It's not a hole, it's just a light-less section of space. Therefore, things cannot be transported with them.
1097113
The sun will die because the hydrogen inside it will eventually be used up. This will create enormous pressure and make the sun increase in size, in fact so large that it will engulf the earth. This enlargement is called a red giant. Then it will blow up and all that will remain is the core or a red dwarf that may collapse in on its self creating a black hole. And all this will happen in about 7 billion years, so no need to worry!
139768
By the time that happens the Earth will have already been destroyed by the sun. But if the Earth was still around, it is highly unlikely that we would collide with any matter at all, since space is mostly just dust and emptiness, believe it or not. We would likely have a higher-than-usual amount of dust moving about the solar system, however.
473814
General relativity (as well as most other metric theories of gravity) not only says that black holes can exist, but in fact predicts that they will be formed in nature whenever a sufficient amount of mass gets packed in a given region of space, through a process called gravitational collapse. For example, if you compressed the Sun to a radius of three kilometers, about four millionths of its present size, it would become a black hole. As the mass inside the given region of space increases, its gravity becomes stronger — or, in the language of relativity, the space around it becomes increasingly deformed. Eventually gravity gets so strong that nothing can escape, an event horizon is formed, and matter and energy must inevitably collapse into a singularity.
1112651
Yes. but for it to stop then the Sun would first have to disappear as it is its gravitational pull which is causing the Earth to orbit at such speed. So there is probably more chance of you winning the lottery every day for the rest of your life than the sun doing a vanishing act.
99768
Sort of!  As the sun slowly runs out of (mostly hydrogen) fuel, it will expand into a red giant and it's radius will be greater than the current position of the Earth.  However, the Earth's orbit is currently projected to move farther out while this happens so our planet will not actually be engulfed by the sun.  It will, however, experience a very large temperature increase.
804289
The average distance to the sun is 92900000 miles, though it is changing. First I should say that the Earth's orbit around the Sun is elliptical, not perfectly circular, so the Earth-Sun distance is changing as we speak just from the Earth traveling in its orbit around the Sun.\n\nIs the orbit itself changing? Well, there are some long-period oscillations, but those are very small, and don't imply that we're systematically moving towards or away from the Sun.\n\nThere is an effect which is making us move very slowly away from the Sun. That is the tidal interaction between the Sun and the Earth. This slows down the rotation of the Sun, and pushes the Earth farther away from the Sun. The principle for the Sun-Earth system should be the same. But how big of an effect is this? It turns out that the yearly increase in the distance between the Earth and the Sun from this effect is only about one micrometer (a millionth of a meter, or a ten thousandth of a centimeter). So this is a *very* tiny effect.\n\nThere is another effect which is also small, but somewhat bigger than the tidal effect. The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, which means the Sun is continuously transforming a small part of its mass into energy. As the mass of the Sun goes down, our orbit gets proportionally bigger. However, over the entire main sequence lifetime of the Sun (about 10 billion years), the Sun will only lose about 0.1% of its mass, which means that the Earth should move out by just ~150,000 km (small compared to the total Earth-Sun distance of ~150,000,000 km). If we assume that the Sun's rate of nuclear fusion today is the same as the average rate over those 10 billion years (a bold assumption, but it should give us a rough idea of the answer), then we're moving away from the Sun at the rate of ~1.5 cm (less than an inch) a year. I probably don't even need to mention that this is so small that we don't have to worry about freezing.
631703
Black holes aren't holes in the sense that you're thinking of. A black hole is a region of spacetime (it has 3+1 dimensions like everything else) that has an event horizon (a spherical region) that nothing can escape from.\nTaking the rubber sheet analogy (this is 2+1 dimensional, two spatial dimensions, 1 time dimension), suppose there is a spherical mass placed on the stretched sheet. Depending on how massive that mass is, the sheet around the mass will be circularly distorted, creating a potential energy well. You can roll smaller masses by it. If you roll the smaller mass with too little tangent velocity, it will spiral into the larger mass. If you roll it with a great enough tangential velocity, it may change direction, but it will go right through the potential energy well.\nA black hole has a certain region of its potential energy well (the region inside the event horizon) where no velocity you give a particle will be enough to get it back out of the energy well; all particles entering the event horizon will spiral into the singularity at the center. Part of the reason for this is the limit placed on massive particle accelerations of only being able to accelerate up to the speed of light in vacuum. It is interesting to note that outside the event horizon (assuming a non-spinning black hole), gravity behaves classically. Ie., if the Sun were to collapse into a black hole (which it doesn't have the mass to do), the radius of its event horizon would be less than the current radius of the Sun, so the solar system would continue as usual; the gravitational field outside the event horizon is unchanged.\nAlso, a black hole need not be caused by the death of a star. Primordial black holes are hypothesized to be black holes that formed during the chaotic spacetime of the early universe.
942382
Black holes do not "suck."  They have gravity just like everything else.  That said if you get VERY close to one (within 2 schwarzschild radii) there are no stable orbits that do not require continuous energy input due to the implications General Relativity (warping of spacetime). If the sun magically turned into a black hole tomorrow, the earth would continue in its orbit as it always has, but would be very cold.\n\nA small black hole in Saturn's atmosphere (ignoring for the moment howa sub planetary mass black hole could form and why it would not quickly settle to the center of the planet) would produce a large amount of x-ray and gamma radiation that is not observed.\n\nThe south polar vortex around Saturn is probably analgous to the polar vortices that form here on Earth that help produce the annual  ozone "holes" over each pole during their respective springtimes. \n\nJust because it isn't a hurricane, does not leave black hole as the only other option.  I am rather startled that what appears to be an excerpt from a popular press science article has this speculation in it.\n\nThe Saturnian polar vortex is different in one respect;  instead of forming in winter, this one is present in summer.  I think all you need is some sort of convection process near a pole to drive such a thing, but I might be wrong.
30629
accoring to space.com, if the earth stopped rotating suddenly.Our atmosphere would still continue to rotate at aprox 1000 mph, obliterating everything on the surface, basically the entire earth would turn into a sandblaster.