Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Discover Teeny Tiny Black Hole
AbsoluteXyro writes "According to a Space.com article, NASA scientists have discovered the smallest known black hole to date. The object is known as 'XTE J1650-500'. Weighing in at a scant 3.8 solar masses and measuring only 15 miles across, this finding sheds new light on the lower limit of black hole sizes and the critical threshold at which a star will become a black hole upon its death, rather than a neutron star. XTE J1650-500 beats out the previous record holder, GRO 1655-40, by about 2.5 solar masses."
They say LHC-001 will be even smaller!
(But who will be there to measure...?)
But XTE J1650-500 is so bland! I think we should name it Mooseknuckle.
Fears raised collider would create black holes that could swallow planet
In David Brin's novel Earth IIRC the Earth's orbit crosses a tiny black hole, which ends up falling into the Earth's core, threatening both the planet and the survival of life on it. What is the real possibility such a thing could occur?
Looks like now we have a small black hole for our youngest planet
Is this the point where they say we'll need to re-think our theories on black hole evapouration too? But first, let's switch on the LHC and see what happens...
HILARITY!
I thought that Black Holes had no dimensions, but this one is several miles across. Where have I gone wrong?
I see we weren't the first to build a large hadron collider.
I guess it sucks less than it's bigger siblings
It may look cute now. But they grow up.
While it may be possible that this black hole was formed from a relatively small (to form a black hole) star, couldn't it also be the case that it just a really old black hole? Hawkings told of how black holes can 'evaporate' over time with lack of surrounding matter, perhaps that could be the case here.
So, we've now discovered the biggest and smallest black holes known to exist within about a week of each other.
When we find the most average, space bears will come and blast us into porridge.
Astronomy kicks ass.
I thought that black holes took up no space, and now a small one is 15 miles across.
Would it be more correct to say this is a measurement of the event horizon?
Yes that's what astronomers mean when they say how "big" a black hole is.
The enemies of Democracy are
First extra-solar Large Hadron Collider discovered.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
They can't figure out the "critical threshold" because there isn't one. It all depends on too many variables to set a universal limit (hehehe get it...universal :-P) It depends on how much nuclear activity there is still going on when it start collapsing and what the amount of heavier atoms is and the amount of other things orbiting the star and any other forces affecting the star at that time and how fast it's moving and spinning. Mass is a smaller part of the calculation than they're making it sound like. If they're going to factor everything in just to find some minimum mass, well duh, two particles and a hell of a lot of force. Haven't they suggested that in that big particle accelerator aka donut of doom. So yeah, a critical mass threshold doesn't exist.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The volume enclosed by the Schwarzschild radius (and therefore event horizon) is typically considered the 'size' of a black hole for common purposes.
What else is there to measure? A black hole is an object defined entirely by its gravity (unless it's hairy, but even then).
...have tiny black holes. :-D
Those scientists surely do not know a lot (if anything at all) around this subject...
captcha: massacre
But is anyone else seeing these Russian bride adverts all over the site?
True theyve probably got a good market to advertise to, Helena wont need as much inflating as your LatexLove3000 but it just seems odd to see them all over Slashdot.
Enclosed within this post was the 5th response relating to the Large Hadron Collider.
Unfortunately, the planet the post was made on was sucked into a black hole shortly after the post was made and the actual content of the post was forever lost.
For those of you who haven't done any Astrophysics...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrasekhar_limit
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
What is the theoretical time before this black hole evaporates through Hawking radiation?
Yup. Once a mass becomes smaller than its Schwarzschild radius, it collapses down to a single point (or possibly a ring?)
About 10^68 yr. Bring a book.
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Albert Einstein's image in the post is running over and overlapping the 'Related Stories' bar which is not looking decent. I do not understang the need for three images when you could do with one.
RutSum.com
Wouldn't the volume be technically infinite? Or at least undefined? It has a measurable surface area (if you're talking about the event horizon), but the curvature of space would make the radius, hence the volume, infinite.
And just following that through... wouldn't that make the average density of a black hole zero? Mass/volume with infinite volume...
INfinite.
A black hole of any stelar size will only radiate like a body in the femto-kelvin range.
This means that galactic background radiation will "refill" it more than it could ever lose.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Tolerance does not tolerate intolerance, or hypocrisy.
Although I dont have the most indepth knowledge of the matter (punn?)... I would say that the chances are next to impossible...
A wormhole, perhaps, but not a blackhole, unless of course we find out that the two are the same... as far as im aware a blackhole would just suck our planet (our moon, maybe Mars, and the entire soral system with it) outright and instantly, whereas a wormhole (hypothetically of course?) could exist as a smaller "hole", however I dont see why it would linger/stay with our planet and constantly eat away at it... but more along the lines of say every orbit the earth makes around the sun, a tiny piece gets chipped/eaten away at a certain position in that orbit at a rather calculatable frequency (similaily to an eclipse)...
...this finding sheds new light...annnnnd, you're fired.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFBc__RCDp0 :D.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
But.... I was pretending spacetime was flat for ease of explanation.
Why do you have to drag out the Infinite Paint Can in threespace on my ass?
ok, I am ripping most of the info from here: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=122375&page=6
"If they were able to make a small blackhole, and it got "loose" and fell to the center of the Earth, the pressures at the Earths core would force material into it so fast that even a very small one would gobble us up very fast. I am not sure what the exact pressure is at the Earths core but it could force material through even a very small "hole" very quickly. I do agree that once it gobbled up the Earth, it would just continue to orbit the Sun, and the Moon would still orbit the blackhole as if it were the Earth..."
No, you should read this thread.
First of all, a black hole that falls to the center of the earth, wouldn't stop there, but would continue falling up on the other side, just to plunge in again, and on and on, because there's no "friction" on the black hole.
Second, there have been posted in this thread a lot of calculations of the speed at which it would gobble up matter.
Don't forget that the black hole we're talking about here IS MUCH MUCH SMALLER THAN A PROTON. As such, pressures on *atomic* level (such as in the center of the earth) matter little: the black hole travels most of the time in the empty space between nucleae.
A way to calculate the probability of hitting a nucleus (and somehow imagining that it would gobble up the entire nucleus, which is MUCH MUCH bigger than the black hole itself - which is a worst-case scenario) is done by calculating the "cross section" of the black hole and its probability to cross a nucleus on its voyages through the earth. We know its speed (just falling), and knowing the cross section and the density of nucleae, we can estimate how many nucleae it could eat per unit of time.
For a classical black hole, the calculation is done in the link provided by Pervect in this post:
http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...4&postcount=12
for a MUCH LARGER black hole, about the size of a proton, weighting a billion tons (figure that! A black hole *the size of a proton* weights a billion tonnes ; we're talking here about black holes that weight 10 TeV or 10^(-24) kg - go figure how small it is !)
For more exotic calculations which are more severe, orion made some, and arrived at a time to eat the earth ~ 10^46 years.
All this in the following rather un-natural hypotheses:
- no Hawking radiation (which would make the black hole evaporate almost immediately)
- production of black hole EXACTLY IN THE CENTER OF GRAVITY of the collision (no remnant particles)
- very high production rate, producing billions of black holes per second.
I am not a physicist, but from what little physics I have had, and from reading threw the thread/flamewar, I dont think we have to worry about the LHC
Anyone know what these (initial) names represent?
XTE J1650-500?
GRO 1655-40?
Thank you, thank you - I'm here all week. The lasagna's great - tip your waitress...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Absolutely zero. The smaller a black hole is, the faster it radiates away its mass in the form of energy. A microscopic black hole would cease to exist in a very small amount of time. One created in a particle accelerator would cease to exist almost instantly, leaving only energy behind. It would be possible to detect evidence of its presence by the energy signature it left, but that's about it. If such black holes can even be created in a particle accelerator, then they will have been created by gamma and cosmic radiation for as long as this planet has been here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
"That's not a black hole, it's a space station!"
It's not the size of your black hole that matters, it's how you manage your singularity.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If that happens, what are we going to do!? Capitan Picard hasn't been born yet! Hell, even Kirk isn't around yet....
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
be Goatse? (no links; if you have not seen one yet, then you do not belong on /. or in the white house).
What if we start throwing massive (antimassive?) amounts of antimatter at it. Is there a point at which whatever is left could expand out of the black hole condition or does it just have to evaporate?
I'm working off a vague memory that black holes "evaporate" by virtual particles popping into existence near the event horizon and the antiparticle falling into the hole and the normal matter particle moving away from the hole, and that being the Hawking Radiation. Is that about it or am I completely off my rocker? (It can be both.)
Because Hawking was never wrong, right?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
If my memory is correct, a 1 kg black hole is supposed to take about 10 billion years to evaporate from Hawking radiation. If so, there has not been enough time for Hawking Radiation to do its work.
Perhaps this LHC business is exactly why we have never encountered alien civilizations?
By the time any of them evolve enough to develop space travel, some smartass comes up with a bright idea of building a giant particle accelerator...
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
This newly discovered Black Hole is the final result of a Large Hadron Collider, that caused a microsopic black hole on the third planet formerly circling the former star now known as 'XTE J1650-500'. So, this is not a naturally occuring black hole, but an alien-created one. Sadly this alien species is now extinct so they can't tell us how to avoid their mistake.
...this finding sheds new light... How much light can really be shed on it?Given the data here it seems that Oppenheimer came up with a value of 3.2 solar masses as the upper limit for a star forming a neutron star. Beyond 3.2 solar masses the star would have a great enough mass to go beyond the stage of the Pauli exclusion principle which applies to neutron stars and go to a black hole instead. Oppenheimer calculated that back in 1939 so I'm not sure why this "sheds new light on the lower limit of a black hole size and the critical threshold at which a star will become a black hole".
Am I missing something? I very well could be but it seems pretty cut and dry.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Personally, I don't understand the value of distances in relation to a black hole. Matter gets sucked in. Light gets sucked in. Spacetime is warped.
Is just space warped? Does space get sucked in? Do we have less space in our universe outside of a black hole because of the inside of a black hole?
If I stretch a rubber band by stretching the universe itself, does that change the diameter of the rubber band?
Should I not be considering all this outside of the spacetime concept?
Well, maybe. Actually, rotating black holes radiate away angular momentum, and they also preferentially eat material that reduces their angular momentum, so it's an open question as to whether real black holes will be rotating. Probably, because the accretion disk is likely to be rotating, and it swallows up the accretion disk and gains the momentum from it, but I'm not sure you can necessarily say that all natural black holes will rotate.
In a rotating black hole, the singularity is actually a ring (or torus). Inside that ring/torus, there is a tear in space.It was this tear that lead, if I recall, to the original conjectures of a white hole, and the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Actually, the Einstein-Rosen bridge comes from the maximum analytical extension of the Flamm embedding, way predating the Kerr solution. (It's a very trivial embedding, z = sqrt(r). The extension is z = plus or minus sqrt(r).) Turns out that the extended Flamm embedding is misleading, and a Schwartzschild black hole isn't a wormhole after all. But that wasn't obvious.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Antimatter would just make the problem worse- antimatter still has positive mass-energy, so it would contribute to the gravity.
Now, the effect of negative mass-energy (if it can physically exist) is anyone's guess.
Not an easy thing to do when your antimatter has negative weight and the black hole has all but infinitely strong gravity.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Emmanuel Lewis and Gary Coleman are going on a booty call!
There are going to be a near-infinite number of quantum-scale black holes and wormholes in whatever volume of space you care to imagine. They evaporate almost instantly. As for stellar black holes, the Chandrasaker Limit is 2.5 solar masses, with a relatively small margin of error. Absolutely nothing of interest will be learned until we're within 2.75 solar masses, because then we can define sensible confidence limits on what the value actually is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
If 15 miles across is technically "teeny tiny" then what is the right adjective for 7.52 inches?
It socks, doesn't it?
as long as Stephen Hawking is still alive, I am sure he can handle it. After all Stephen Hawking beat all the other great scientists in poker with Commander Data in the far future, so he should be smarter than Picard or Kirk. If anyone knows how to reverse a black hole it would be Hawking.
Besides never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon Five problem.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I'd love to know XTE J1650-500's secret. I've tried diet and exercise, but I'm still only down to 3.9 solar masses and 16 miles across.
Careful! Last cowboy who tried that broke his back, mountin'.
While negative matter is attracted to normal matter, it also repels normal matter. Large amounts of negative matter would tend to fly apart.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Another short story, well worth the 5 minutes it takes to read, is The Hole Man by Larry Niven. It has a pea-sized planet-gobbling black hole as a central part of the storyline.
http://www.danamania.com/tmp/holeman.txt has a copy.
1. Build LHC 2. Create Black Holes 3. Throw in socks 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Not a physicist, but I think the volume within the event horizon is undefined, not infinite, due to curvature of space.
Interesting thought, tho.
Any physicists wanna weigh in?
There is no such thing as antigravity ("negative weight"). Antimatter has the same mass as normal and they are attracted to each other.
Goatse is prior art.
A point singularity would be forbidden by QM. It would have a radius however small it would be.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ha! I knew all stuff I was learning in physics about frictionless perfect spheres would be useful somewhere!
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
for those wanting to find the article later, I strongly suggest Slashdot's own search instead of googling for the words "teeny", "tiny", "black" and "hole" :|
The black hole is about the size of a dead pixel on the ccd. Oh wait..
No pun intended of course!
Uh, let me take that back.
That's mere 7.6 billion billion billion metric tons. Almost nothing.
...especially with the loose application of proper units.
/.ers are, of course, excused as usual from this and all other forms of exercise):
Please try this exercise (dedicated
1. Touch your index finger and your thumb together.
2. Hold the assembly up to your eye (close your other one).
3. Now slowly separate the two until you can see through to the other side.
Anything that fits in the resulting gap is, by definition, "Teeny Tiny" - anything else is not! 15 miles is most certainly not - 15 miles is "Feckin' Jaysus! Where does this bastard live anyway?"
C'mon lads let's raise the bar a little here - we're not creationists.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
What's imho more important: at this scales, electrostatic forces are far more stronger than gravitation. If a microscopic blackhole produced out of clashing protons (charged blackhole) could grow, protons themselves could grow into blackholes as well and atoms would collapse. I would even go a step further than LHC and try to catch and stabilize microscopic blackholes. Atoms with charged blackholes as it's center surely have some unique properties. Hell, if we could create uncharged blackholes out of neutrons and combine them with charged blackholes out of protons we could build atoms with fine-tuned absorption spectra.
Blacks Holes Suck !!!
>>as far as im aware a blackhole would just suck our planet (our moon, maybe Mars, and the entire soral system with it) outright and instantly
Not true.
A black hole formed from the matter composing our planet would retain the same mass as our planet. The black hole would retain the same orbit as the original planet; if the moon wasn't annihilated by the radiation caused by the implosion of Earth, it would continue to orbit the singularity.
The black hole wouldn't collide with any other planets unless we were already on a collision course with them, which is not the case.
Orbits are determined by mass and velocity, and those would not change if the earth was swallowed by a locally-produced black hole.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I say they compare it to the cover of 'Smell the Glove'.
None more black...
Infinite is a good approximation, but if the universe continues expanding infinitely, then any patient observers would likely see all of the black holes evaporate into an incomprehensibly vast, cold, and dark void.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
If you're in Blackburn, Lancashire, you have a 1:40,000 of finding a hole going to Australia. The rest are quantum entangled with strawberry fields.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
perv scientists finally found space pr0n :)
I can't believe that there are object that will exist until the end of time! Crazy!
There's no "friction" because the usual definition of that word implies non-conservative interactions inside the materials of the interacting objects.
In the case of black holes, there can't be any such "internal interactions", because they have no (observable) internal structure. Their only features are mass, charge and other quantum numbers (all of them, but the electrical charge and spin are probably the only ones that are important at those levels) and the event horizon. The event horizon depends only on those features; note that it's not an "object", it does not interact in any way with anything that crosses it, it's just a surface drawn through empty (but curved) space. So "swallowing" something happens pretty much like free-fall.
There are some features that would look similar to friction, though:
1) When the black hole swallows something (eg, a nucleon), this is equivalent to a perfectly plastic impact between the black hole (moving) and a nucleon (approximately static) resulting in another larger but slower black hole because of the conservation of momentum & energy. (Note that in the first such impact the nucleon is _much_ larger than the black hole, so it would look as if it stopped for an instant. The effect of each nucleon would be progressively smaller after that.)
2) Since the black hole is so small, it's _much_ likelier to absorb an individual particle rather than a whole atom. If it happens to swallow a neutron, this doesn't change things muchâ"except that the "source" nucleon might become unstable and undergo fission; the conservation laws might also cause some local effect when the nuclear bonds are broken.
However, if the black hole swallows up an electron or a proton (or even a single quark), things can get much interesting: it becomes charged, and the electrical interactions become _much_ more important than gravity. If it swallowed an electron, it might even form an "atom" together with some nearby nucleus. It may "touch" nothing else for a very long time then for the same reason electrons don't hit each other... If it hits a proton, it can behave very much like a (very small) hydrogen ion, pair up with an electron, and likewise become insulated from normal matter.
Note that the above assumes a neutral black hole. If the black hole is not neutral from the start, it will _not_ crash through the Earth in free-fall, it will mostly behave as described above.
(The above description might happen relative to color charges, when swallowing a quark, but that's way above my head to reason about. I'd guess in that case it might very quickly swallow the rest of the nucleon, so only electric charge remains.)
However, if a black hole _does_ get fast enough that it can't get caught in an atom like that, the result will be a very quickly moving electric charge through the Earth. It will interact electrically with matter, which will propagate energy throughout the Earth through the later's chemical's bonds, and that _is_ non-conservative, so it would look a bit like friction. A very slight bit.
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
scant 3.8 solar masses
Next time my wife thinks that I need to lose weight, I will mention that 3.8 solar masses is still considered "scant".
I guess it is all relative.
See my Home Theater
Actually, the object was thought to be a microscopic black hole, but was discovered later in the story to be a synthetic object -- not a black hole, but "black hole like," and probably alien in origin. The characters of the story speculated that this object was sent to wipe out an upstart civilization that had just become detectable (i.e., us).
How disaster is averted is pretty cool too, and one of many big ideas that makes the book an interesting read.
There's a Larry Niven story in a similar vein called The Hole Man, though it takes place on Mars. In that case, the black hole was trapped in a device on Mars that was left there by aliens, some kind of communication device that used gravity waves. (And someone manages to hit the equivalent of an EMO and shuts off power to the electromagnetic containment, since this black hole apparently had a charge and could therefore be held in place by powerful magnetic fields. Naturally, once the fields are off, you can imagine the hilarity that ensues... although really, why would a race smart enough to build a gravity wave communicator put a button somewhere that could do something so insanely dangerous?) In that story, the outcome was less cheerful, but the ultimate loss of Mars was calculated to occur well into the future -- a black hole that size can only gobble up tiny bits of matter at first.
If such an exotic object hit Earth before evaporating into a puff of Hawking radiation, we might notice the impact site but remain ignorant of the cause -- in Brin's book, one of the characters speculates that the exotic object was the cause of the Tunguska explosion. If the object has sufficient velocity, it might pass right through the planet... and if not, it would settle down to oscillate back and forth through the Earth, turning the interior into Swiss cheese before collapsing the planet into a singularity.
On a related note: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080406