A black hole where the Moon used to be sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but let’s get into what would happen if the Moon, that battered, glowing ball, turned into a black hole with the same mass. The result is a mix of normalcy and weirdness.
A black hole isn’t a giant vacuum sucking up everything around it. It’s a point where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. If the Moon’s mass—about 7.35 × 10²² kilograms—compressed into a black hole it would shrink to a speck smaller than a grain of sand, with a Schwarzschild radius of about 0.1 millimeters. That’s hard to wrap your head around, but its gravity from Earth’s distance would be the same as the Moon’s. Our planet’s orbit wouldn’t budge and the tides wouldn’t just disappear.
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Tides are where things get weird. The Moon’s gravity is what makes our oceans rise and fall in a regular rhythm. A black hole with the same mass, 384,400 kilometers away, would pull on the oceans in the same way. You’d still get high and low tides, but the black hole’s tiny size might mess with the patterns slightly.
Experts say the tidal forces near the black hole itself would be nuts because of its mass, but from Earth’s distance it would be almost imperceptible. The big change would be the night sky—without the Moon’s light nights would feel darker, heavier, more emotional than physical.
Earth’s spin adds another twist to the story since the Moon keeps our planet’s tilt steady so we have predictable seasons. A black hole with the Moon’s mass would do the same so we wouldn’t have climate chaos. However, it does move away from Earth at 3.8 cm a year which slows down our planet’s rotation. This means a black hole wouldn’t move the same way. Over millions of years this could change how long our days are but you wouldn’t notice anything right away.
If the Moon turned into a black hole the world wouldn’t end. Tides would continue, seasons would stay the same, but the night sky would most certainly feel different. Plants and animals would adapt, scientists would have a blast and the rest of us would look up at a sky that feels a little too bare.
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