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Atom Smasher May Create "Black Saturns"
David Shiga writes "If we ever make black holes on Earth, they might be much stranger objects than the star-swallowing monsters known to exist in space. According to a new theory, any black hole that pops out of the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland might be surrounded by a black ring — forming a microscopic 'black Saturn'. This could happen if extra dimensions exist, as string theory suggests, and if they are large enough." An evocative excerpt from the article: "...there is an outside chance that in a few years in a tunnel near Geneva, physicists will make a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut."
mmmmmmmmmmmm, higher dimensional.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
black saturn
Are you actually suggesting that string theory might actually predict something that the standard model doesn't, and what it predicts might actually be measurable?! That's crazy talk! Next you'll be suggesting that string theory is disprovable and therefore actually science. I'll believe it when it happens.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I can't read the fine article because CyberSitter blocks it. However, I did remember an article a while back that changed the way black holes were perceived to operate.
.pdf showing his original hand-drawn representation along with some of the mathematical principles behind the whole "there is no true event horizon" hypothesis. Where was that? Ah. There we go.
Hm. Maybe google will help me to remember what it was. Oh yes. There it is. Darn. CyberSitter blocks loading that page. I know, user prefs, threshold 5. There we go. Now I can at least see the summary. Click, read, yep, that's the one I remember. Now, Samir Mathur, I remember a very nice
Someone please tell me how the current article lines up with these from years past. Please try to do so without profanity so that I can click my comment and read the reply without CyberSitter dumping the page.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Wait, so Homer was right about the donut shaped universe? Damn Hawking, always taking credit for other people's ideas!
Then suddenly global warming won't seem like such a big deal?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I suppose it would be funny to see the Moon or Mars get sucked into nothingness after a catastrophic black hole test. Would be even funnier if one made a "sluuuuuup!" noise as one watched it suck up on itself.
Then the Cyberdemons would invade. Doom had black holes on Mars didn't they? My memory is fuzzy.
In theory, such a small black hole will not have enough gravitational pull to keep itself together for very long, much less pull in other matter. Such a black hole should only last a few nanoseconds (if even that), then dissipate... in theory.
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...the dreaded Black Uranus.
That is something you don't want anywhere near you.
Am I the only one concerned that making mini-black holes might suck in the whole earth?
You're not the only one worrying, but trust me, there's no danger of this whatsoever. First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else. Remember, on an atomic scale there is mostly space. And these things are not just small -they are so small its hard to fathom. They are formed by smashing together protons moving at 99.999999% the speed of light. A black hole (might) be formed, if, during the collision, the resultant density of the object is greater than the density required to form a black hole. The gravity will be no greater than the mass of the objects combining it, so you don't need to worry about it sucking things in. Let me jsut give you an example. A basketball could, theoretically, become a black hole, so long as you compressed its mass into a small enough area -but it would still have the gravitational pull of a basketball. And here, we are talking about turning protons into blackholes! In short, nothing to worry about chap!
It has to do with quantum moderation - a post can be in multiple states at once (offtopic/funny) until you look at it, then it takes assumes one and only one.
First of all, they will dissipate almsot instantly due to Hawking radiation. Second of all, they are so tiny that they will rarely (if ever) get close enough to swallow something else.
Third of all: The kind of (and energy of) collision in question occurs with non-trivial frequency when cosmic rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. If it created a long-lived black hole that could suck down a planet in a geologically short time we would have been down the drain LONG ago.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The short answer is: don't worry.
All black holes emit "Hawking radiation", which causes them to slowly lose mass. For black holes below a certain size, this evaporation due to Hawking radiation will be so fast that they won't even have a chance to grow through matter accumulation before they evaporate into nothing. I know this doesn't match up with the pop-science description of black holes--where they consume all matter around them until nothing is left--but suffice it to say that the pop-science explanation leaves out many of the important details.
So, again, the creation of micro-black-holes is nothing to worry about. Remember that although the energies in the LHC are really massive, there are other similarly high-energy natural events occuring throughout the universe, and they appear not to routinely form micro-black-holes that consume everything around them. Creating stable (i.e.: big) black holes appears to be a comparatively rare event.
Some people are not appeased by the above arguments and point out that our current theory of particle physics may be lacking in some unforseen way, and we will destroy ourselves. Then again, the only reason to think a black hole will form at all is because of the current theory of particle physics. If that theory is wrong, it's more likely that... well... no black hole will form at all. (Again, look around the universe and notice the distinct lack of universe-consuming mega-black-holes.)
Don't worry. If the LHC were going to make Earth-swallowing black holes, if there were any real chance at all of it happening, then cosmic rays would have done it long long ago.
Earth-cosmic ray collisions occur at an absolutely fantastic rate, higher than the LHC would ever even dream of. The energies of cosmic rays are distributed across an extremely broad spectrum, extending both above and below LHC energies. If there is any chance of the LHC making an Earth swallowing black hole, then there is precious little chance of the earth being outside of a black hole by tomorrow morning, much less any chance of the earth having survived 4.5 billion years.
Furthermore, pretty much everything in the galaxy, and presumably in the universe, experiences a cosmic ray flux comparable to what the earth sees. If the LHC were going to make planet or star swallowing black holes, then the sky would be mostly nothing but black holes.
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wait... not that kind of sig.
I feel my chances of getting laid drop with every chuckle at this joke.
If you think Lake Geneva and Lake Constance are large, wait until you see Lake Switzerland.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I always wondered why they added the event horizon nullifier in swiss army knives!
If it was that easy to make black holes, then cosmic rays could cause black holes...
I think Prof Hawking said that a collider capable of making black holes, would be the size of the solar system.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Because the black holes (if they are formed at all) are not what we are interested in. Additionally, the detectors that we use at LHC weigh on the order of thousands of tons. That'd be an awful big weather balloon to lift them. Furthermore, the detectors we use are very narrowly focused. If a collision doesn't take place nearly exactly at the center of the detector, with the two particles involved having pretty much exactly equal speeds in opposite directions, then our measurements will not be on, or at any rate, the detector will be immensely more difficult to calibrate so that we get some kind of meaningful results from it. Also, having the detector underground, we can shield it from a lot of noise that adds uncertainty to our measurements. Finally, the results are immensely easier to study (in some ways, possible to study) if the particles involved always have nearly the same energies as in every other collision we are studying.
Cosmics have energies spread out over an absolutely huge range of energies. Their timing and location are nigh unto impossible to predict. We don't get anything like a 0 net momentum collision between a cosmic ray and an atmospheric atom. The upper atmosphere is an incredibly noisy place, primarily because of cosmics. We would have an awful hard time telling the difference between a particle that originated from a cosmic-atmosphere collision we were interested in and a stray particle that came from the hadron shower of some other cosmic-atmosphere collision.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
OK, time for Physics 101: The mass of the original object collapsing will decide the mass of the black hole. Weight != Mass.
A larger star collapsing will form a larger black hole of the SAME mass.
A molecule collapsing to form a black hole[forced to] will form a black hole of the same mass of the molecule.
The smaller the black hole [smaller mass], the faster it will evaporate due to Hawkins Radiation.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
If youre new to John Titor, heres the complete archive of his texts:r _project.html
p g1
. cgi?noframes;read=165532
h tml
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/the_john_tito
An interesting interview with Larry Flynt:
http://www.larryflynt.com/notebook.php?id=95
I have my fair deal of scepticism against John Titor and the claims he has traveled from the future to fetch an old IBM machine besides testing the time-machine, but so much that he wrote about in 2000-2001 thereabouts, has in fact come true. These are just the broad ones:
http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/
This is yet another drop in this mans pretty hefty prediction bucket. At the time of this link, there were no mentions of black holes being generated in the new smasher, but now it seems that this too will come true (if possible), and very much in the same timeframe as predicted too!
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread124980/
This is the person who even told Hawking was wrong, and later Hawkin conceded he was wrong on the subject!
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/forum
Time Traveller The Movie. John Titor doesnt HAVE to be proven correct. WE can DO something about it, starting with ourselves!
http://www.fasttrackproductions.biz/TimeTravel_0.
A site that is covering news in the media and corelating it with Titors predictions:
http://www.johntitor.com/
I dont claim any of this is true, in whatever what you regard as truth, but when reading this, it is startling how accurate the person who wrote those messages in 2000-2001, is describing the trends of our society, problems of the US, Mac Cow Disease, CERN beginning to experiment with mini-black holes, and much more.. For the sake of our planet, and our future, it is worth considering living as THOUGH weve already been through this, than not. He describes a more primitive, but also a more enlightened society if you read the archives from the first link.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/