Our world will be sucked in by enormous gravitational forces and crushed like an empty beer can. Black holes are gravitational fields that gobble up everything in sight, making entire star systems vanish like water going down a drain.
Scientists believe they are born when a star collapses.
Over the eons, as more and more surrounding matter is sucked into a black hole, its gravitational strength steadily increases. The ultra-dense black hole recently detected near the center of our galaxy has a mass estimated to be equal to 100 billion of our suns. Scientists have known since the 1960s that our solar system is on the move and in recent years many have theorized that the powerful tug of a black hole could be responsible. Even though Earth is zooming toward the black hole, we have no sensation of movement because our world, the sun, the moon and all the planets of our solar system are being dragged toward the black hole at the same rate, scientists say. But the average earthling's period of blissful ignorance will draw to a close in the coming year.