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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.'"
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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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...
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.
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?
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.