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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)."
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"The Hole Man" by Larry Niven.
pooptruck
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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
Turns out, anyone can slow their heartrate to zero if a black hole starts to pass through their body.
"... 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
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.
"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"
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?
Just what they needed to create the quantum computer: A mini black hole as /dev/null
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.