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Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole
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)."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
From the article:
.....................
"However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole."
Those were the last words we've heard from New York now..
We'd just like to offer our hopes and prayers to anyone in the area..
We have no idea how fast this is spreading, but at the current rate, it should hit..
what..
that can't be right..
The black hole would not behave as a pendulum for long. As it takes in new matter the system must conserve momentum. So if it fell half way to the center of the earth and then gained some mass, it would lose velocity, and hence not have enough speed to make it back to the surface on the next oscillation. The resulting black hole floating around the earths core would be very interesting. Just think of all the earthquakes we'd have as the planet slowly shrank - or not so slowly...
I once heard a remark at some long forgotten source of unknown credibility that stated the amount you would have to jam together to consume earth before it radiated itself away in Hawking Radiation was about the size of Mount Everest. Take this with a couple kilograms of salt, mind you, as I don't recall the source.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
According to the article, it probably has not been destroyed and will be around for about 4 months total:
My reasoning is this: regardless of the American and British differences in the definition of "billion", 10 million billion billionths of a second must equal 10 million seconds. And /usr/bin/units
says that 10 million seconds is about
equal to 3.8 months.
However, I suspect what they should have said is that it "lasts just 10 millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second", which would be a number that's 18 orders of magnitude smaller than what they actually said.
I just want that FUCKING joke to disappear!
what exactly is causing these black holes to form?
There is a critical mass for a black hole to form due to gravity, but the key thing here is not mass but density. You crush anything down to a small enough space and it will be come a black hole. The event horizon will be determined by it's gravity and in such examples it may be smaller than an atom. n this case, they've smashed two gold ions together with enough energy that bits of the atoms have reached that critical density and formed a blck hole. This black hole absorbed some of the other particles that collided with it (because the gravity would not be great enough to actuall draw in particles, they would pretty much have to be just headed towards it anyway), where they were probably either ripped apart by the event horizon or absorbed. In either case, energy was radiated out from the destruction of the particles or from Hawking Radiation. In just a breif time, the amount of Hawking Radiation that such a thing creates will make the black hole evaporate.
Interesting question, is that if this is happening can we create such black holes and then pump them full of matter quick enough so that we end up with a net release of energy greater than what it took to preform the experiment? We wouldn't need a sustained black hole, just to continuously create more and dump matter into them and get energy out to make it an energy source.
In astronomical terms, Mount Everest isn't that big.
Neither is the entire Earth.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Maybe you can explain this to me. If the virtual particles are created in equal proportions of matter and anti-matter (they'd have to be, wouldn't they?), wouldn't you have a matter particle sucked in just as often as an anti-matter particle, meaning no net change in the mass of the black hole?
Apparently I'm missing something here, but all the explanations I've heard of Hawking ratiation are either just how you described it, or way, way over my head in technical terms.
Next time, leave the punchline to someone else.
True, but it's also a *hell* of a lot more then we can shoot through a particle accelerator as I understand it... :-)
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
I think professors should be called in to teach you about black holes.
:) Aren't there a few different theories about black holes? Seems to me that something that warps space/time so drastically that it causes standard equations to get messed up is not something to tread on lightly.
:) I am not a professor, black hole expert, relativity expert, physics expert, or yadda yadda. This was just my opinion based on my poor memory about black hole research I've read. If someone has more information on this, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Which one?
Now, for my disclaimer so I don't get flamed too bad if I'm out of touch with research here.
Queue the predictable Austin Powers quotes.
an ill wind that blows no good
One of the best pieces of evidence that we're not going to destroy the Earth with our current generation of particle accelerators is that cosmic radiation already reaches higher energies than we can create. For example, the superconducting supercollider would have reached 40TeV; yet, some cosmic radiation sources, such as Cygnus X-3, are as high as 1,000 TeV.
And, of course, scientists are well aware of the risk. There have regularly been "are we going to destroy the Earth?" discussions - for example, when the first fission and fusion bombs were being considered, there was concern about starting Earth's atmosphere fusing.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
It's just science journalists. I tend to go and look at better sources like SciAm. And remember, this all depends upon repeatability. If it's a one-off, then you're going to see a lot of skeptical physicists out there. The fusion debacles are not forgotten yet, and as always, incredible claims require equally incredible evidence. It could be something more mundane (if there is such a thing at the subatomic level).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sure they probably have it right, but it is the 0.0001 percent chance that they are wrong that scares me .0001% chance they are completely Right with their models of black holes.
Given history it's probably a
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Several AC's have incorrectly claimed that you can't use a mini-black hole as a power source. There will be a certain power input required to create the black hole in the first place, but if you manage to create a stable one, then you've got an indefinite power source: a device for converting the mass of whatever matter you toss into it into energy. This doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because you're not getting more energy out than you put in -- but since you don't have to generate the energy locked up within the matter's mass to begin with, it's a useful energy source. It's like fusion: you get some energy out of the nuclear binding energy; there's some waste energy, but still a lot of useful work possible because you didn't have to create that binding energy to begin with; the atoms are just sitting there all ready to be used. As long as you have a supply of mass, you can keep getting enormous amounts of energy from it (via E=mc^2) by feeding it to a black hole, since the only energy
YOU have to put in is the energy needed to move the matter from wherever it is to the location of the black hole.
It's like claiming that the little light bulb in your headlight is powered by Nuclear Fusion because it emits light in the same general spectra as the Sun. Of course, if you say it with a butt-load of incredible equations, and then give the paper a hugely sensational title, the media whores are gonna run all over the world with it.
Which is what happened.
There's one born every minute, and they all work for the media during sweeps week.
I don't quite agree. Black holes do "suck", by which I mean attract things into themselves rather than having them orbit around them like a Newtonian black hole would. They only do this within a few gravitational radii of the hole - inside the "last stable orbit". A little way inside that, you have an actual event horizon which is the point at which gravity becomes the "unstoppable force" you claim doesn't exist.
GR black holes are different than Newtonian black holes, yes. But... at distances large compared to their event horizons, they are pretty much the same thing. And in neither case is a black hole more dangerous than any other object with the same mass. (Again, at distances large compared to the event horizon.) That's the misconception I wanted to address. The idea that a black hole in the solar system would mean death for everyone. The sun itself could magically compress into a black hole, and aside from it getting really cold here, it would make no difference.
I didn't claim that the "unstoppable force" doesn't exist; it is the very definition of the event horizon. I said that it doesn't reach out to consume everything around it. The gravity reaches out exactly as far and strong as it used to at all distances down to the previous radius of the object before crushification.
I agree with your other comments, though if you're talking about people near solar-mass holes you should mention the tidal forces...
I thought that was a bit beside the point, since the discussion was mainly about tiny ones.