Slashdot Mirror
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)."
Some time ago, I had one of my minions to compose a list of possible ways of destroying the Earth. Back then, he rated the "microscopic black hole plan" as follows:
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. 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 matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
However, now it seems that we're a step closer to accomplishing this, so i might have him revise the list.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Does anyone else think assassins should be called in to prevent this experiment from creating a real black hole that swallows up the whole planet in minutes?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It would be good to know if they had destroyed it yet.
Euh? Does that make it 10 million seconds?
mund freud.
welcome our new Kwisatz Haderach Blackhole overlord!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
we should all know in about 4.2 minutes whether it is really a black hole or not. It was nice knowing all of you. Thanks for all the fish.
We eat everything we can find, then something else come out from the other end?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
These tiny blackholes will fall into the core of the earth, and slowly grow one quark at a time, but at an accelerating rate. In a 100 million years or so, it'll come back to haunt the descendents of the super dolphins that'll overthrow the advanced alien race that'll conquer the robots that'll destroy us.
The same thing happens when I eat at Taco Bell, but no one has claimed my stomach is a black hole.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
This sounds familiar....Pass me the crowbar
The e-print of Nastase's paper.
Look!
I just want sharks with frikken laserbeams attached to their heads!
That sucks...
if John Titor predicted this...
"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
A puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matteA puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matter believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gerald A. Miller (206-543-2995, miller@phys.washington.edu), have teamed up for the first time to propose a solution to this puzzle. Reporting independently of the RHIC collaborations, they take into account the fact that the low-energy pions produced inside the fireball act more like waves than classical, billiard-ball-like particles; the pions' relatively long wavelengths tend to overlap with other particles in the crowded fireball environment.
This new quantum-mechanical analysis leads the researchers to conclude that a primordial phenomenon has taken place inside the hot, dense RHIC fireballs. According to Miller and Cramer, the strong force is so powerful that the pions are overcome by the attractive forces exerted by neighboring quarks and anti-quarks. As a result, the pions act as nearly massless particles inside the medium.
Such a situation is believed to have existed shortly after the big bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the pions work against the attraction to escape RHIC's primordial fireball, they must convert some of their kinetic energy into mass, restoring their lost weight. But the pions' experience in the hot, dense environment leaves its mark: the strong attractive force (and the absorption of some of the pions in the collision) would make the fireball appear reduced in size to the detectors that record the pions. According to Miller, looking at the fireball using pions is like looking through a distorted lens: the pions see the radius as about 7 fermi (fm), about the radius of an ordinary gold nucleus, while the researchers deduce the true radius of the fireball to be about 11.5 fm (Cramer, Miller, Wu and Yoon, Phys Rev Lett, tent. 18 March 2005).r believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gera
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
We all know the only way to get rid of a black hole is to detonate a nuclear device less than 20 feet away from it. This will cause the wormhole to jump to another stargate and the world will be saved.
I for one welcome our new singularity overlooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....................
who can save us from these "scientists" that are bent on terrorizing the world with black holes
I'll sleep soundly tonight knowing the black hole formed in NY is "not thought to pose a threat". Very comforting.
Here is the proof that time travel is possible; an article posted on April 1st, 2005 has taken a trip thru a blackhole and found itself on posted on March 17, 2005. If my theory holds true, expect April 5th's dupe on tomorrow's Slashdot queue.
I sig, therefore I was.
Better not get your necktie caught in one of those!
Well great. We've got in our hands the most destructive force in the universe, and we're playing with it. I hope we survive long enough so I can buy a "Anti-wrinkle black hole" for my wife some day. Or maybe a "Tonka Wormhole" toy for my kid. I don't even want to know what Barbie and barbie toys they come out with.
This technology is not a toy. May cause suffocation, asphyxiation, paralysis and may crunch you into a singulatity if you stand to close when in "action" mode.
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...
...cacodaemons and imps start crawling out of your rift in the space time continuum.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
of the sub-plot in Thrice Upon A Time
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole."
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The usual blackholes with at least a solar mass will last incomprehensible amounts of time since a particle formed near the event horizon has to somehow escape the blackhole's gravitational grasp and you have to somehow move the entire black hole's enormous mass in this way. Don't hold your breath.
They already have. They're scrambling to pull out stuff they've already written. Predicted sequence of events:
First we'll hear about the new black hole movie
Disney will re-release "The Black Hole" on DVD
Scientists will explain that it wasn't really a black hole after all, but the major media will not pick up the story because the movie and tv series have already been started and Hollywood will lose too much money
TV mini-series comes out just before the movie
Movie comes out
Dept. of Homeland Security informs everyone that to keep safe from a black hole, buy duct tape and plastic and cover your windows.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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"
---You can't mend a broken heart by pretending it's not broken.
No that takes beer.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
nt.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
"The Hole Man" by Larry Niven.
pooptruck
The Brookhaven National Lab located on eastern Long Island, NY gives summer Sunday tours of their facilities(2004 schedule). If you have the chance, then GO! Seeing RHIC up close if pretty damn cool. I'm no particle physicist but their tours are quite impressive and are given by the researchers themselves. Oh, and yes they have beowulf linux clusters too.
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
Did no-one pay any attention to SpiderMan 2? I mean I know Kirsten's nipples are distracting and all, but come on - it's all there!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
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.
aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
*arms flailing*
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Don't forget the SciFi channel direct to video: Anasquitto vs. Pythlack Hole!
I drank what? -- Socrates
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
I've read Haldeman's story and it's related, but it's about creating a huge ambitious setup.
...
David Brin's book 'Earth' describes a black hole that 's created at laboratory scale. It's small and innocent and it can't be contained. So it escapes immediately and starts gravitating to the middle of the earth and it grows by sweeping up whatever it passes by. Very slowly at first, but then faster and faster.
This gives a nice touch to the comment in the article that the black hole is harmless
on would almost forget that the guy in the article is perfectly right.
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
This is really scary. What if Al Qaeda were to get a hold of this technology? Could they use it to achieve their ultimate mission of destroying Western civilization? Sure, they'd take themselves out too, but there would be 72 virgins waiting for them in heaven, just like there were for the 9/11 hijackers.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
The krone experiment? I remember a late 80's spy thriller with a sci-fi twist at the end. It takes them most of the book to realize they're not dealing with a Soviet superweapon, just an out of control black hold punching holes in the planet.
We just discovered how all the black holes in the universe formed...
Simple
Making black holes occurs sooner in a species technological advancement than interstellar travel.
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.
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?
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.
articles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation
In technical terms, we call that "burning items to generate heat."
Software Wars
I doubt that many slashdotters will make it to heaven.
Can we get a picture of this thing please? Thanks!
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"
Brookhaven NL, where the RHIC's new black hole lives, indulged in the possibility of creating a "strange" black hole about 6 years ago. 50 miles from NYC. What have they got against us?
--
make install -not war
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...
Turns out, anyone can slow their heartrate to zero if a black hole starts to pass through their body.
Yes, particles and antiparticles are both created and absorbed in equal proportions. Hawking radiation works because the particle/antiparticle that gets absorbed has negative energy, while the one that is radiated away has positive energy; the one that falls in acquires negative energy because it falls in. See this explanation by gravitational physicist Steve Carlip.
"... it is not thought to pose a threat"
I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel.
Next you're going to tell me the possibility of a resonance cascade is extremely remote and that you're seeing predictable phase arrays.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
It was a short story in N-Space called "The Hole Man" by Larry Niven. Here karma karma, come here karma
Oh look, the karma is running away. Bye karma, bye bye karma.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Queue the predictable Austin Powers quotes.
an ill wind that blows no good
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.
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"
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?
"Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader."
My God! It's every physics textbook I've ever read!
"World-wide catastrophe, *phfff*, don't be ridicu
Table-ized A.I.
If one did make it, there would then be 73 virgins waiting.
No, you just defined Hell: the 72 virgins ARE Slashdotters - all male.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Hmmmm...wonder if they could be convinced to move their labs closer to Redmond.....
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
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
You just wasted a lot more than a sig's worth of bandwidth.
I really hope that this is just a joke
The bit about the evil minions didn't tip you off?
-mkb
Prof. X: So, have you finished writing your thesis yet?
Graduate student: Uh... no.
Prof. X: And how is that?
Graduate student: Um...a black hole ate my data?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Well, this will be my final post. I'm creating a nuclear powered egg to send my child off in, then I'll retire to the South Pacific to wait for the black hole to swallow us all. I tried to warn them- I TRIED! But I can't leave now and cause a panic.
I can only hope that my son ends up on a planet where the solar radiation allows him to fly around, fighting bad guys and getting hot chicks.
Everyone knows you just need duct tape.
The particle accelerator has 2 miles of maintenance corridors, 3 miles of wires, a 4 terabyte of data storage, and is held together with 11 miles of duct tape.
A 'Super String' was discovered yesterday in a quantum-super-electron microscope. It appeared to be a flat ribbon-like material that was sticky on one side and silvery on the other.
I so succeeded it, didn't i? ^_^
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
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!!!
He is not a sun god.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Check your chemistry. Since NO and NO2 and N2O5 formation is endothermic, nitrogen in air will not ignite regardless of the temperature - and this fact was well known in 1942-5.
What was not known was the actual temperature and compression required for starting fusion of (light) nuclei like hydrogen and nitrogen. Possibility of hydrogen fusion was investicated since the start of the project. And since nitrogen fusion was presumed to operate in some stars, the remote possibility of igniting fusion in earth atmosphere by fusion bomb was floated at one time. Bethe did some quick math to explain why this was unlikely and re-confirmed it later with more rigorous paper. But the idea of seting air on fire got out and made some non-technical people in government worried.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Just what they needed to create the quantum computer: A mini black hole as /dev/null
> At these energies and distances, gravity is not
> the dominant force in a black hole.
Where do they _find_ these people?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
If one did make it, there would then be 73 virgins waiting.
well... while 73 is a very cool prime number, i personaly find 72=2*2*2*3*3 more interesting one, becouse it can factorized in so many different ways (ex: 9*8, 6*12 2*6*6 and so on) - it can be considered as an advantege. For example you can assign your all 72 virgins into equal groups to do something - the task imposibble with prime number 73. Such a possibility can have an adventage over just having 1.3888% more virgins.
Alternatively one can argue that you can take one virgin apart to play with her in any way you want and at the sami time assign the remaining 72 virgins into some equal groups, but it puts you in the situation of choosing one over all others which brakes this beautyfull symetry of number 72.
The question "what is better: 72 virgins in the heaven or 73 virgins in the heaven" seems to be a very thoungh one.
Not true. Read up on "Hawking radiation". Hawking theorized that virtual particle pairs created by tidal forces (which normally recombine for zero net result) would sometimes be split by one falling into the event horizon and the other proceeding into the outside universe. Since tidal forces become exponentially stronger the smaller a black hole is, so does the Hawking radiation. Since mass is conserved in this process, to an outside observer it appears as though the black hole is radiating energy and shrinking. Very small black holes shrink much faster than they can pull in Earth-density mass (small event horizon and total gravity), so such a black hole would simply explode rather than growing. This explosion is expected to be quite large by our standards, by the way.
(Hence, if the sun randomly imploded to a black hole, nothing would get sucked in - it'd just be a helluva lot colder and darker)
True, except the potential energy of the Sun's mass in it's current configuration would likely cause a highly energetic event as the mass was sucked into a black hole with a few kilometer event horizon. BTW, I assume you know that a star smaller than 1.4 solar masses can't naturally form a black hole.
Incidentally, 10 million, billion, billionths of a second sounds to me like 10 million seconds...
Much simpler to write it as 1.0e-24 secs.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
a neutron star with the density of Sol would be roughly the size of a baseball
A neutron star with the density of Sol would not be a neutron star.
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
"Artifact" by Gregory Benford