Can a Black Hole Destroy Earth? Earth is facing no threat because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for our planet. According to NASA, even if a black hole the same mass as the sun replace the sun, Earth still would not fall in.

Lightning travels at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second. This means that you see lightning pretty much when it happens. When lightning strikes, a noise is made which we call thunder. Thunder travels much slower, at the speed of sound, about 1088 feet per second.

The reason we see a flash of lightning before hearing thunder is because light travels faster than sound. The speed of light depends on what it is moving through – being slow in gases, fast in liquids, and even quicker in solids. In the air, sound travels at around 332 metres per second.

The speed of lightning While the flashes we see as a result of a lightning strike travel at the speed of light (670,000,000 mph) an actual lightning strike travels at a comparatively gentle 270,000 mph. This means it would take about 55 minutes to travel to the moon, or around 1.5 seconds to get from London to Bristol.

The good news about massive black holes is that you could survive falling into one. Although their gravity is stronger, the stretching force is weaker than it would be with a small black hole and it would not kill you.

There is no way a black hole would eat an entire galaxy. “The gravitational reach of supermassive black holes contained in the middle of galaxies is large but not nearly large enough for eating the whole galaxy.”

Judging from the number of stars large enough to produce such black holes, however, scientists estimate that there are as many as ten million to a billion such black holes in the Milky Way alone.

The black hole is located about 1,500 light-years away from Earth. Scientists have discovered what may be the smallest known black hole in the Milky Way galaxy and the closest to our solar system – an object so curious that they nicknamed it ‘the Unicorn. ‘