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Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole

Posted by Zonk on from the slurp! dept.

MoogMan writes "BBC News reports that a lab fireball may be a black hole. From the article: "A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said. The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter falls into a black hole and comes out as "Hawking" radiation." More information available from the NewScientist article (subscription required)."

3 of 699 comments (clear)

  1. Get the paper here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The e-print of Nastase's paper.

  2. Not black hole, but the dual of one by Brane · · Score: 5, Informative
    I think this article may be based on a misunderstanding. The paper in question is here, with the title The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole (my bold).

    If I understand this correctly, the dual is meant in the sense of the "AdS/CFT-correspondence", which is a mathematical correspondence, or "duality" between a gravitational theory (which may contain black holes) and a "Gauge theory", which is the kind of theory that is used to describe quarks, electrons etc.

    The duality means that calculations on black holes may (possibly) be used to understand certain things about this "fireball", but it doesn't mean that the fireball is actually a black hole.

  3. Re:hmm by srstoneb · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know there are a lot of jokes that can be made about the idea of building a black hole in a lab, but I just want to make sure people understand how not-dangerous a tiny black hole would be:

    Black holes do not "suck". Most people -- even most smart people -- have this impression that black holes suck in everything around them with some sort of unstoppable force. This is completely inaccurate.

    Black holes only influence things by their gravity. The force a black hole exerts on another object depends on their masses and the distance between them. Exactly the same as the gravitational force between any other two objects, black hole or no.

    The part that makes black holes weird is that they can be significantly smaller (as measured by their event horizon) than normal objects. So if you've got an object with the mass of the Sun, normally it's quite large, so the distance between you and its center is big, and the gravity can only get so strong. If you compress that mass into a black hole, though, you can get much, much closer to its center. If you're only a few kilometers away from the center of gravity of something with the Sun's mass, *then* the gravity will be really strong.

    When it comes to very small black holes -- especially the type that might be created by a particle accelerator, with masses far less than that of a single atom -- the mass involved is so miniscule that you'd have to get within femtometers or less before the strength of the gravity would even be noticeable.

    Now, *if* black holes were indestructible, eternal objects, then yes, even a small one would eventually pick up enough stray neutrinos to start growing, and could eventually become a threat. But, Hawking radiation takes care of that. In fact, the rate of "evaporation" of a black hole *increases* as the black hole shrinks. So micro-black holes would be very short lived, and, again, therefore not a problem.

    Here's the wikipedia article on Hawking radiation for reference.