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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)."
"When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons."
and it also says that at these speeds and energy levels (sorta redundant there), gravity is not a concern for these tiny blackholes. So this is my question: if its not a critical level of mass causing an event horizon, disallowing anything but x-rays and the fore-mentioned radiation to escape.. what exactly is causing these black holes to form? Does it have somethjing to do with the petential energy actualizing on such a large scale? (a sortof critical speed instead of mass)
someone help!
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Why yes, he did
Titor gave technical details about his time machine that involved the use of mini-black holes. He stated that CERN would make an announcement pertaining to this within a year after he discussed it. In the fall of 2001, after John left, CERN issued a press release indicating the possibility of creating mini-black holes was realistic. The work being explored in this area was speculated upon some months prior to that time.
Looks like he was a bit early, though.
Actually, at scales this small gravity is not the dominating force (thats from the article). A gust of wind would literally blow the black hole apart. Its actually pretty interesting from a research perspective. You can see how black holes work, throw something in, see how it comes out, etc... The only thing though is that in order to have some real fun you really do need massive blackholes because then you can warp spacetime and have well defined event horizons etc...
Regards,
Steve
Well, there were some folks that figured the first atom bomb might vaporize the atmosphere, but the people involved said, "let's blow it up and find out." And we know the rest.
// This is not a sig.
Larry Niven wrote it, as a locked planet mystery story. It's in whatever the current collection of his short stories (N-Space?) is at B&N (picked up last year, now packed away).
I drank what? -- Socrates
Your "black hole" is a little farther down. B-)
(Not strictly a joke, by the way. The literal translation of "black hole" was one of the common euphemisms for the body part in question in Russian, about the time the physics phenomenon was first being figured out. That made it difficult for the Russions to work on it. Black hole research remained out of favor in Russian physics departments until Russian physicists came up with a different term for them.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
insightful? he copied that from the article. sheesh.
now we get modded up for copying one sentence in the text, not just the entire article.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Looks like he was a bit early, though.
In the fall of 2001, after John left, CERN issued a press release...
Not sure if the actual statement from him said that they would do it within a year or they would "make an announcement pertaining to this" but if it's indeed the latter, I'd say the "prediction" was satisfied for whatever that is worth. Now it's (possibly) been done, so I guess you could also say that CERN's "prediction" happened also.
Seems Titor's technique was to pick up on some things that were just coming into the fringe of the public eye but not really making significant news yet and then make a prediction that just basically said "this will be a big deal in a few years". Although this is not terribly hard to do, the fellow did it very well and has hitherto been pretty lucky about his choices.
A Titor of today would probably choose to make sweeping predictions regarding the economic growth of China and the looming energy crisis it will cause. He might make some bold declaration about nuclear power coming back into vogue
Some of his statements were a little too bold and forward looking, though. Tthe US goes into civil war this year according to Titor; however, historically the US political system has survived many tragedies larger than an economic slump or bad apples in power. He also had said that medicine takes a big step backwards and medical advancement slows, which is also historically highly unlikely. If there is all this crisis going on, then historically, medical advancement INCREASES during times of long crisis. Perhaps Titor did not do enough study of history before making some of his predictions. Unfortunately for him, the few bold and horribly wrong predictions will probably collapse the credibility of the hoax. Other than that, it might have been a pretty good one.
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly.
Actually: You need one big enough to evaporate more slowly than it absorbs matter on its trip. Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, [...]
As it absorbs the matter it also absorbs its momentum. If it absorbs any non-trivial amount of material on its way through it doesn't get near the surface even on the high point of its first half-orbit.
[...] but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then
Except very near the surface the planet will have collapsed the holes as fast as they form.
Also, it has to be moderately large by the time it gets to a near-stop at the core. While it's orbiting at about planetary diameter it's passing through lots of stuff. Once it's at the core it's depending on the pressure to push stuff to it. So it has to be big enough by then that the absorbtion from pressure beats the losses through hawking radiation.
But even if it evaporates it will have converted a significant mass to energy. Do this enough and something that wouldn't detectably affect the planetary radius could cause a LOT of volcanism - at some geologic time later when the heat makes it to the surface.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It was my understanding that Hawking radiation is the emission of either a particle or antiparticle from a pair of the two generated just this side of the event horizon of a black hole, where the particle's partner falls into the event horizon and the particle floats on to live another day, appearing as radiation emitting from the black hole. The pair only comes into existence with a boost from the gravity of the black hole.
If this is done in a particle accelerator, which is a vacuum, and the objects with which we're dealing are gluons and other sub-atomic particles, how can their resultant mass be high enough to generate the requisite gravity for such a thing, and from where is the pair made in the vacuum?
At the least, shouldn't the other forces override the strength of gravity by an enormous amount?
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu)
For those who aren't SF fans, I believe this is the same John Cramer who wrote the novel _Einstein's bridge_, about interdimensional gateways created by accident in the Superconducting Supercollider. No, not our abandoned project, but the one in a parallel universe where the SSC wasn't cancelled... and is poking holes into our universe in the middle of the empty Texas prarie.
Let's keep an eye out for doppelgangers of nuclear physicists mysteriously showing up in New York...
David Brin is great, and Earth is probably the most relevant story to this news, as part of its plot involves a man-made black hole. Besides the black hole stuff, it's a great attempt at a 50-year prediction. 50-year predictions are tricky because they need some big leaps but nothing too discontinuous, and cool because they're a time frame that a lot of us might live to see tested.
From BBC: These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
From New Scientist: These particles form a ball of plasma about 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun
AND
From BBC: This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second...
From New Scientist: The fireball, which lasts a mere 10-23 seconds, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision
Are they covering the same story?
At what point will the black hole absorb more from the particle stream than it loses to hawking radiation? Can this be achieved in a particle accelerator?
Considering these are quantum issues, what are the odds?
This reminds me of something I saw from a while back, the idea of an optical black hole.
Basically, it has nothing to do with gravitational black holes, but the semi-hysterical press stories didn't pick up on that at the time either.
I'd explain it, but follow the link, or try this one for something clearer and simpler. I got these links from this search, but not all the results look relevant. Still, you may be able to find more, at least starting there.
If you need more minions and you offer health insurance, I know a few unemployed geeks who would like to make your acquaintance.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Because they believe that the defiled virgins would have their virginity miraculously restored after the fact. I shit you not; they do believe this. It is, after all, in Paradise, where all things are possible.
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
Hmm, could you levitate a black hole against the force of gravity and feed it matter at a rate equal to its evaporation rate, then use the radiated energy as a heat source?
Would such a construct be a useful direct mass to energy conversion device? Or would it just irradiate all the mass in the vicinity, producing lots of radioactive crap to get rid of?
This is the first step to building the Romulan Warbird I've always wanted!!!
Actually, the interesting thing is that we only have theories about black holes, no direct evidence. Not only that, but black holes push the boundaries of our understanding of physics. AFAIK, we've never directly observed hawking radiation, and so we don't even know that it has to exist. We only theorize that it really should because it fits what we know so far of relativity and quantum mechanics.
So, if they actually did manage to create a small black hole, and then it evaporate, we have our first direct evidence that hawking radiation is real.
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Your formula applies to launching a point mass with the mass of the Earth away from another planet the size of the Earth. Mine applies to dispersing all of the matter within the Earth to infinity, which I think is the correct thing to do.
a derivation of the gravitational binding energy formula. (Too lazy to type it in myself.)
He is not a sun god.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured.
Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
You can levitate a charged black hole.
But Hawking radiation is going to radiate a zoo of particles and I am not sure how useful that would be.
Classically you can lower a mass from a wench and extract all of the mass to energy as it approaches the horizon, but the rope required would be rather unrealistic.
It's thought that gamma-ray bursts may in fact be black wholes that finally evaporate into nothingness. The rate of Hawking radiation is inverse to the size of the black hole, so when they're about to go, they go out with a bang.
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