‘Nightmare fuel’ video shows what would happen if Earth were sucked into a black hole

Black holes are one of the scariest parts of outer space - even the name is enough to send chills down your spine.

You would be forgiven if you hadn't considered what horrors might happen if Earth got sucked into a black hole - but you're about to find out, thanks to a video from the YouTube channel What If.

These interstellar bodies exist in their millions, and each one has the potential to be hugely destructive if you're nearby, as they can suck matter in voraciously.

We think most black holes are created in the wreckage of a large star that died in a supernova explosion, making for a pretty violent origin story.

The biggest are known as supermassive black holes - these can be millions or billions times the size of the Sun, and there's one lying in the heart of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*.

We're still light-years away from it, though, and completely safe - but if one was closer, the results could be crazy, as What If's video explores.

It explains that if even a tiny one-millimeter black hole was right next to the Earth, it could utterly destroy our planet.

Whichever side of the Earth was nearest to it would apparently begin stretching, getting sucked into the black hole, and our atmosphere would be vacuumed into it, too.

Eventually, Earth would disintegrate and be totally destroyed. Even if we were just in the orbit of a black hole, our planet would almost certainly become impossible to live on.

Science Photo Library - MARK GARLICK / Getty

This is because the climate would become unbearable as we slowly began to stretch - a process literally called spaghettification, which stretches matter out as it's sucked towards the black hole's center.

This effectively means that any matter of any size will eventually be just a string of atoms as it enters the black hole, which is pretty terrifying.

Given that thousands of asteroids would also be pulled along and likely pelt the planet as they went, there are dozens of different ways that humanity could be exterminated if any of these events came to pass.

So, no matter which way you look at it, What If's video makes it clear that we're right to be scared of black holes - they're jaw-dropping entities, and the more we learn about them, the more impressive they become.

And people are suitably terrified in the comment section, with one YouTuber writing: "The scariest part is that not even sci-fi movies have had such destructing plots, yet this is the actual reality."