“EVERYONE thinks that if the sun turned into a black hole tomorrow we’d all be sucked in, but that just wouldn’t happen,” says astronomer Andy Fabian at the University of Cambridge. “The Earth wouldn’t really notice the difference – it would keep happily orbiting.”
That’s because unless something stripped the Earth of its angular momentum, it would continue in its path exactly as before. The same is true of matter in the “accretion disc” around a black hole, which raises the puzzle of how black holes manage to slurp this matter in. Now astronomers think they have figured out exactly what depletes the disc’s angular momentum.…
