Lab-Made Fireball May Be a Black Hole 699
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)."
Hmmm.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Last words... (Score:0, Insightful)
"However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole."
Those were the last words we've heard from New York now..
We'd just like to offer our hopes and prayers to anyone in the area..
We have no idea how fast this is spreading, but at the current rate, it should hit..
what..
that can't be right..
One flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is that shit running? :P (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the article, it probably has not been destroyed and will be around for about 4 months total:
My reasoning is this: regardless of the American and British differences in the definition of "billion", 10 million billion billionths of a second must equal 10 million seconds. And /usr/bin/units
says that 10 million seconds is about
equal to 3.8 months.
However, I suspect what they should have said is that it "lasts just 10 millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second", which would be a number that's 18 orders of magnitude smaller than what they actually said.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:1, Insightful)
I just want that FUCKING joke to disappear!
Re:can an expert chime in here? (Score:3, Insightful)
what exactly is causing these black holes to form?
There is a critical mass for a black hole to form due to gravity, but the key thing here is not mass but density. You crush anything down to a small enough space and it will be come a black hole. The event horizon will be determined by it's gravity and in such examples it may be smaller than an atom. n this case, they've smashed two gold ions together with enough energy that bits of the atoms have reached that critical density and formed a blck hole. This black hole absorbed some of the other particles that collided with it (because the gravity would not be great enough to actuall draw in particles, they would pretty much have to be just headed towards it anyway), where they were probably either ripped apart by the event horizon or absorbed. In either case, energy was radiated out from the destruction of the particles or from Hawking Radiation. In just a breif time, the amount of Hawking Radiation that such a thing creates will make the black hole evaporate.
Interesting question, is that if this is happening can we create such black holes and then pump them full of matter quick enough so that we end up with a net release of energy greater than what it took to preform the experiment? We wouldn't need a sustained black hole, just to continuously create more and dump matter into them and get energy out to make it an energy source.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither is the entire Earth.
Re:Hawking radiation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently I'm missing something here, but all the explanations I've heard of Hawking ratiation are either just how you described it, or way, way over my head in technical terms.
How gauche (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Which one?
Now, for my disclaimer so I don't get flamed too bad if I'm out of touch with research here.
How original... (Score:3, Insightful)
Queue the predictable Austin Powers quotes.
Re:Don't wory about it yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
And, of course, scientists are well aware of the risk. There have regularly been "are we going to destroy the Earth?" discussions - for example, when the first fission and fusion bombs were being considered, there was concern about starting Earth's atmosphere fusing.
Re:Better explanation: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Given history it's probably a
Re:hmm (Score:1, Insightful)
YOU have to put in is the energy needed to move the matter from wherever it is to the location of the black hole.
Re:NO, it was NOT a "Black Hole' (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like claiming that the little light bulb in your headlight is powered by Nuclear Fusion because it emits light in the same general spectra as the Sun. Of course, if you say it with a butt-load of incredible equations, and then give the paper a hugely sensational title, the media whores are gonna run all over the world with it.
Which is what happened.
There's one born every minute, and they all work for the media during sweeps week.
Re:How original... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or maybe s/he is just sick of every science discussion on Slashdot devolving into unoriginal attempts at humour that average about 4.3x10^-2 picoCartmans.
Re:hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
GR black holes are different than Newtonian black holes, yes. But... at distances large compared to their event horizons, they are pretty much the same thing. And in neither case is a black hole more dangerous than any other object with the same mass. (Again, at distances large compared to the event horizon.) That's the misconception I wanted to address. The idea that a black hole in the solar system would mean death for everyone. The sun itself could magically compress into a black hole, and aside from it getting really cold here, it would make no difference.
I didn't claim that the "unstoppable force" doesn't exist; it is the very definition of the event horizon. I said that it doesn't reach out to consume everything around it. The gravity reaches out exactly as far and strong as it used to at all distances down to the previous radius of the object before crushification.
I agree with your other comments, though if you're talking about people near solar-mass holes you should mention the tidal forces...
I thought that was a bit beside the point, since the discussion was mainly about tiny ones.