Earth can be destroyed by 5 dangerous things in the universe

There are things out there in the vast universe that are potentially life threatening.

The malignant universe is full of objects that could destroy not only civilisation but the entire solar system.

Earth is a small little world when compared to the entire universe and wiping it off the face of space isn't as difficult as you think.

With objects like black holes and neutron stars wandering close by, and by close we mean in cosmic terms - light years, it isn't not hard to believe that our home planet could be under potential danger.

Let's take a look at some of the scary cosmic monsters that are lurking around us:

- Rogue black holes

For those of you who don’t know, black holes are colossal cosmic beasts and once you're in one, there's no coming back. Their gravitational pull is so strong that anything that gets pulled in (beyond the event horizon) it can't escape, not even light. And because of the light sucking void they are not at all easy to spot in the vast darkness of space and may be hundreds around our galaxy.
Rogue black holes, around 600 million times the mass of the sun, are the ones that got kicked away when galaxies collide and are sent swirling into space at 9.5 million kph. So basically, you can’t see them, they’re massive, they’re fast and they’re coming to get you.
If a rogue black hole is hurling towards Earth, it most certainly tear the solar system apart and slurp everything into its dark mysterious hole. What happens in there is still a puzzle for scientists, but their best guess is being shred to pieces.
 

- Galactic cannibalism

If you’re thinking about enormous galactic objects eating each other up, you're on the right path.Galactic cannibalism is when two galaxies ‘merge’ with each other in a gigantic cosmic collision. This may seem exciting, but the bigger galaxy's gravitational pull would consume the smaller galaxy. Earth would most likely be thrown into the outskirts or be fried up by things like hypervelocity stars, huge stars that move at 1.6 million kilometres an hour.
And just so you know, our Milky Way galaxy is on the course to collision with our neighbour galaxy Andromeda which is by the way a lot bigger. That’s right, in a couple billion years, we will be eaten.

- Our Sun

Here’s where you would want to bring up the question of friend or foe. The sun though providing us with heat and light and proving to be one the essential things for life has a dark side. First off, solar storms. Solar storms are radiation and streams of charged particles from the sun erupting surface. It wouldn't actually be a threat to human life, but it could potentially disturb our technologies like the one that hit in 1859 called the Carrington event.
And once the sun's ‘teenage’ years are over the sun will swell up into a big red star called a red giant which probably will swallow the Earth. Although we still have around 4 billion years before we have to worry about that, but it's going to happen.

- Gamma ray bursts

Gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) are one of the most powerful events in space which happen with the collapsing of a super massive star or collision of two black holes or neutron stars that are so bright we can see them for billions of light-years away.
You wouldn't want to be in its path when it goes off though. If Earth turns out to be in the 'beam path' (direction where the rays would head out) it would blast our planet with huge lethal levels of radiation and stripping away the atmosphere which would eventually lead to mass extinction. Yikes!

- A Magnetar

A neutron star is an insanely dense star with all its mass crunched up into an area of about 15km, which means it's pretty darn heavy. Basically, teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about 10 million tons.
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field. If it gets too close, the magnetic fields are strong enough to disturb your molecular structure which means you would in a way, dissolve.
Two of them, though quite far, hit Earth without notice in the past. In 1979, the solar system was hit by the radiation of a magnetar that inundated the detectors of three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory and another in 2004 which penetrated deep into the ionosphere.
These high-velocity magnetars aren't even that rare!

But you don't need to start panicking just yet. The chances of any of these events happening are very slim or really far in the future.