The end of the world is a fashionable and almost inexhaustible topic. No sooner had the talk about the “prophecy of the Mayan calendar” subsided when a new date for the end of the world was “appointed” - July 17, 2015.
The next news about the impending world catastrophe did without ancient prophecies and other mysticism: the cosmic acid cloud was declared the "culprit". Talk about it began back in 2005, but for a long time remained in the shadow of the "Mayan calendar". But December 21, 2012 passed, and nothing interesting happened, and they remembered about the cloud. Initially, the end of the world was "scheduled" for June 1, 2014, but then the date was "postponed" more than a year in advance - July 17, 2015.
Doomsday scenario
American (according to other sources - English) astrophysicist Albert Shervinsky, close to NASA, reported about the impending catastrophe. According to the scientist, a supermassive black hole located in the center of the galaxy has erupted an acid cloud, the size of which is 16 million km. At the moment when the cloud was "spotted" by the orbiting X-ray telescope "Chandra", it was in the region of the conditional radius of the black hole.
According to the astrophysicist's calculations, the cloud should reach the solar system in 2014 or 2015. Possible consequences vary from article to article - from the death of all life on Earth to the complete destruction of the solar system, including the Earth.
Journalists asked NASA for clarification, but experts from the space agency replied that they did not know anything about Dr. Shervinsky or about the acid cloud. Of course, it was concluded that both NASA and scientists around the world, bound by a general conspiracy, are hiding such important information in order to avoid panic - after all, nothing can be done anyway.
Scientists' opinion
In reality, the scientists were not silent. This information was commented on, for example, by an employee of the Astronomical Institute. Sternberg G. Rudnitsky. According to the astronomer, the name of Dr. A. Shervinsky is known exclusively from news publications about the notorious cloud - the scientific community does not know such an astrophysicist: he did not appear among the participants of any symposium, congress or scientific conference, did not publish a single scientific article - not about an acid cloud, about anything else. Apparently, A. Shervinsky is a character invented by journalists. This assumption is also supported by the obvious absurdity of the idea allegedly expressed by him.
A black hole is an object with colossal gravity and therefore attracts all matter that is within the gravitational radius. It can only eject a jet - a beam of radiation in the form of a stream of high-energy particles. Acid is not radiation, but matter, therefore, a black hole cannot erupt in any way an acid cloud.
The solar system is located 23,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. If the mentioned cloud were in the region of a black hole, no telescope could detect it at such a distance. Even if such a cloud exists and moves at the speed of light (which is impossible according to the laws of physics), it will reach the solar system in 23,000 years.
There are no acid clouds in space at all - there are gas and dust clouds. Theoretically, they can contain acid molecules, but the density of the substance is too low to dissolve anything or poison someone. And even a meeting with an ordinary gas-dust cloud does not threaten the Earth: the clouds move in the spiral arms of the galaxy, and the solar system is located between them.
However, even if a gas-dust cloud appeared near the solar system, it would not have any effect on the Earth, only astronomers armed with special equipment would notice it.
So, the next prediction of the end of the world turned out to be one hundred percent fiction, which has nothing to do with science.
