What would happen if a black hole wandered into our solar system?

Black holes are massive, mostly invisible and so powerful not even light can escape them. So what would happen if one entered our solar system?

It depends on a lot of factors, including the size and distance of the black hole, experts told Live Science. But in many scenarios, not much would happen."They're not, per se, destructive," Karina Voggel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center in France, told Live Science. "It's just mass. Very compressed mass, but mass. It's not a cosmic vacuum cleaner."

If a black hole did wander into our solar system, the largest effects would be gravitational. And those effects would depend on the mass of the black hole. 

"The black holes that we're confident exist are all much more massive than the sun," Robert McNees, an associate professor of physics at Loyola University Chicago, told Live Science. "And the sun's gravity dominates the behavior of bodies in the solar system all the way out to tremendous distances, and so anything more massive than the sun wandering into our neighborhood on scales much larger than the solar system would have noticeable effects." 

The black holes we know of are either stellar-mass black holes — that is, black holes that are between a few to 100 times the mass of the sun — or supermassive black holes, which are 100,000 to billions of times the mass of the sun and are generally found at the centers of galaxies. But there are other possibilities, too.

Related: Could Earth be inside a black hole?

For example, it may be possible to create mini black holes in a particle accelerator. These would range from a single gram to around the mass of a human, and they'd be microscopic in size. "Nothing would happen if that just passed by, even if it passed by right in front of my face, because they evaporate in less than a second," Voggel said.