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Lab Created Black Hole?
Blarrrg writes "Humans may have created the first ever black hole in a lab. From the article: 'When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons. These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.'"
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If it is a black hole, it's comforting to see that Hawking was right and they do evaporate, rather than sit at the Earth's core devouring us all.
Even if it's not a black hole, experiments that produce surprising results are always welcome.
Sean Ellis
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How about instead of the beeb we get some papers?
s ,grp_math,grp_nlin/1/all:+AND+Nastase"+"Horatiu/0/ 1/0/all/0/1
http://arxiv.org/find/grp_q-bio,grp_cs,grp_physic
Direct link didn't work in the preview so you guys have to copy and paste.
Not all are directly related to the article, but a few are.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
So, it lasts 10, 000,000, 000,000,000 / 1,000,000,000 = 10, 000,000 or 10 million seconds, or (lessee, carry the one...) almost 116 days?
You know, scientific notation was created for a reason.
10 million, billion, billionths of a second? That sucks!
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
According to The Physics Factbook the temperature of the surface of the sun is approximately 6000 C. (I am assuming that it is the photosphere temperature that is ment here.) A temperature 300 times higher would be about 1.8 million C which is an order of magnitude less than the temperature at the center of the sun (~15 million C). I would have thought that these collions would have resulted in temperatures much higher than that.
Does anyone have a better reference for the effective temperature involved?
And the knowledge that they fear is a weapon to be used against them...
This isn't the sort of experiment that I want to see go out of control...
Czech language for absolute beginners
A friend of mine (a nuclear physicist) worked on a similar project at CERN (IIRC). At the time there were some (mostly unfounded) worries that the produced black holes would be a danger to man kind (they're not, as the article says they evaporate so quickly you hardly get to detect them.) Anyway, he said that if everything goes to hell, he planned to enter the afterlife wearing a t-shirt saying "I DID IT!" :-)
I thought this was one of the many reasons that CERN was getting new particle accelerators. It was my understanding (from my tour at CERN) that current particle accelerators just didn't have enough energy to create these miniature black holes and the first experiments to try wouldn't be started until the end of this decade when the new CERN detectors are finished.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
AFAIK, there's a strong dispute over whether this is really a black hole. The most plausible explanation against black holes at RHIC is that you get similar effects (rapid thermalization) from the high acceleration only, and gravity is not needed. Google for 'Unruh effect' for more.
The interesting/important bit about these heavy ion collision experiments is the creation of quark-gluon plasma, which resembles matter at the very early stages of our universe.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
/.-ers may be interested in this article by Max Tegmark and Nick Bostrom which discusses various possibilities for doomsday (including formation of black-holes in HEP experiments). The gist of it is that we shouldn't become complacent about such events just because they haven't happened yet -- rather the fact that we observe that the Earth/Solar-System/Galaxy/Universe has existed so long is simply an observational effect.
Wasn't going to happen anyway. A black hole's attaction is proportional to its mass, and since its event horizon radius (our co-ordinates) is likely to be pretty small, it's not going to bump into a lot so as to swallow it.
Wikileaks, no DNS
It's not really a 'black hole', more of a 'singularity'. IANAPhysicist, but in my opinion a black hole actually lasts long enough to trap at least one photon (hence the word 'black'). During the 1E-25 seconds this singularity was around, a photon moving at a nice round 3E8 m/s has the opportunity to move about 0.0000003 Angstroms. 1 Angstrom is the width of a hydrogen atom. This kind of makes me wonder how fast the "jets of particles" are moving that are absorbed. Is it more that they just didn't appear when expected so were assumed absorbed?
so in a couple of years i could have one of these things in the bottom of my trash can and never take out the trash again? yeah science!
i don't care
>> Humans may have created the first ever black hole in a lab.
That's nothin'. Three years ago my PHB created a black hole in his office. He calls it a desk, but everyone else knows better.
17 March 2005
Than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
Joy. Sounds like the nuclear handgrenades in the old pulp "Time Wars" series by Simon Hawke. No doubt there are lots of good uses like propulsion or power generation as well.
Supernovas Are Industrial Accidents
Come on, here at my small university we have a homegrown black hole. We have a guy here, last name Black and we occasionally play basketball on our lunch breaks. Whenever we pass the ball to him, we never see it again. Nickname: The Black Hole. We have been studying this phenomena for some time now. The one strange part is, when we pass the ball to him, it can often be seen immediately being repelled in an upward arch towards some unknown destination. We usually call this The Ill-Advised Shot.
I was wondering where all those headcrabs suddenly came from.
sudo ergo sum
First off, this is a dupe from a Slashdot story earlier this year, though I didn't turn it up. Second, as was pointed out in that thread, this isn't a black hole. The paper concerns a dual black hole. Without going into the mathematical details, a "dual black hole" is something that doesn't behave like a black hole, but whose behavior can be mapped into a mathematical "dual space" in which it does behave like a black hole, so that we can use the mathematics of black holes to describe the non-black hole behavior of the actual phenomenon.
sucks.
how do you know it didn't just, in a billion-trillion billionth of a second, fall to the center of the earth, where it is now getting all the raw mass it needs to grow and grow .. ?
i mean, after all, you can't really measure what you're doing..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Several similar mistakes have been made in reporting stories like this in recent years. It's not unusual for two physical systems to be described by similar mathematical models even though they are not in fact similar systems (at least not in the conventional sense of 'similar'). Studying one of these physical systems can give clues about how the other might behave. But it doesn't actually mean that a system of the first type is actually a system of the second type.
-- SIGFPE
From the top of the page:
Last Updated: Thursday, 17 March, 2005, 11:30 GMT
The BBC article is from March 17 and it was on /. on March 17.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/1 7/1541230
Well, I suppose there is one good thing about this post, at least it wasn't made by **Beatles-Beatles.
For those unfamiliar with that story, 18 of 20 submissions by **Beatles-Beatles have been posted by ScuttleMonkey - At one point, three in a row (within a few hours). I'm wondering when the other /. admins are going to wake up to this crap...
I fully expect my karma to be obliterated for this post, last time I said something regarding the ScuttleMonkey issue, my post went from "+5 informative" with 9 reply's - to "-1 Offtopic" the next morning. Hmmm... Censorship by /. admins? Keep up the good work guys...
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I think there are two really important points to keep in mind:
1. There will likely be only a few people really worried about any given risk calculated to be of very low probability, even though the potential worst case is indeed an apocalypse.
2. It seems quite likely that some boogeyman in nature which will bite us with one experiment or another is the answer to the Fermi Paradox, in that the apparent nonexistence of aliens is due to relatively simple scientific experiments backfiring. On the other hand you would think that aliens who figured that much out would be trying to tell everyone about it.. Anyway there are other possibilities, that quantum reality wierdness makes it more likely we are the only civilization in our light cone, or that it really is hard to make intelligent life. The point being that the Fermi Paradox is a good reason to think carefully about terrestrial experiments (into high energy physics, nanotechnology, etc.) and what the potential worst case might be of them. It is highly unlikely that this will stop momentum of physics experimentation but at least should make the few doubters more vocal. We only have one planet for the species at this time after all.
altough it's an old news item and the blackhole is quit tiny. Keep in mind that this was only al "realy SMALL" particle collider. Currently there's an international project by europe china and america, the large particle collider, see http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/ When ready (soon) this will be the biggest of it's kind and i wonder what things it might create. I don't like the idea of a blackhole near earth..
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Create a universe (or a black hole) in a lab? My, how high and proud our civilization has become. I think that's called "hubris", isn't it?
Is there anybody here who thinks that we can create a cosmic singularity (infinite density, zero dimensions) by smashing subatomic particles together under magnetic acceleration? No, RTFA - the event being studied has such a high energy density that it can mimic some of the conditions present shortly after the "big bang", and the mathematics of the situation have some similarities to those found in a cosmic singularity, BUT THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS A "BLACK HOLE". I can foresee that physicists working on the Grand Unification theory may well get some data from this type of experiment, but for the doomsayers I suggest that the probability of such an experiment causing the destruction of our planet/solar system/universe is on a terribly low ord
Uh, will the last guy leaving the planet please remember to shut off the lights and lock the door on his way out? Thanks!.. there, that text would have been funny ..
Julia emailed me and said I could see all her black holes. But I felt uncomfortable and deleted it.