[hoorayimhelping]

From my understanding, something that can wipe out the entire solar system at once is highly unlikely.

Huge bursts of concentrated energy coming out of black holes are usually tight beams of high energy particles and light (x-rays, gamma rays) moving very fast and aligned with the object's poles. The focused beam of energy is what is deadly to life. If it's not tight and focused and moving fast, the energy dissipates out into space.

The solar system is huge and extends in three dimensions. A burst of energy that hit earth directly could miss Mars (or the moon, or the space around the earth and the moon) entirely. To sterilize a specific planet, the event has to be close (within like 10,000 light years I seem to remember reading) and the poles of the object undergoing the event have to be pointing at the planet.

[simonh]

If the black hole was only 1,000 light years away, and the angle of divergence of the beam was only 0.1 degrees, by the time the beam hit our solar system it would be about 2 light years across, or 126,000 AU.

Compared to interstellar distances, our solar system is tiny.