Lab Created Black Hole? 101
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.'"
Interesting Result (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if it's not a black hole, experiments that produce surprising results are always welcome.
The Temperature Seems Low... (Score:4, Interesting)
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.
According to The Physics Factbook [hypertextbook.com] the temperature of the surface of the sun is approximately 6000 C [hypertextbook.com]. (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?
Old news, black hole unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Interesting paper (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting Result (Score:4, Interesting)
You are aware that if he was wrong and the black hole didn't evaporate, then it would also emit no Hawking radiation and be largely undetectable? So it could very well have fallen out the bottom of the collider and even now be orbiting the Earth's core deep underground...
Not a black hole? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a black hole (Score:2, Interesting)