Black Holes Grow By Eating Quantum Foam

An anonymous reader writes "The discovery that even the most distant galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores is a puzzle for astrophysicists. These objects must have formed relatively soon after the Big Bang. But if a galaxy is only a billion years old and contains a black hole that is a billion times more massive than the Sun, how did it get so big, so quickly? Now one cosmologist says he has the answer: black holes feed off the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime. This foam is 'nourishing' because it contains quantum black holes that can contribute to the black hole's growth. This idea leads to a prediction: that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way must also be growing in this way and at a rate that we should be able to measure. Just watch out for the burps."

Re:Predicted growth rate?

[mmell]

Agreed. If quantum foam imparts mass more quickly than Hawking radiation removes it, so much for the "Big Rip" . . . but no "Big Crunch" either. How 'bout "Universe go down the hole..."?

Frighteningly similar to Commander Crichton's wormhole weapon (save considerably slower).

Re:Con CERN

[It doesn't come easy]

Actually, it kind of fits if you bring all of the intelligent guesswork together. I read somewhere that the tiny tiny tiny black holes (possibly) created by the LHC would evaporate (due to Hawking Radiation) at an exponentially accelerating rate -- the more mass they lost the faster they would loose more, ending in a quantum sized obliterating explosion. If true, and if this new idea is correct as well, that would imply that there is a perfect point where the mass evaporation from Hawking Radiation would *just* equal the mass accumulation from consuming quantum foam. If the black hole mass starts out greater than this point then the black hole grows, less and it shrinks. Someone ought to be able to calculate (roughly?) the magical amount of mass needed to produce a pseudo-stable black hole...

End of the Universe

[McFortner]

If black holes grow by the absorbing the quantum foam, then the universe is slowly gaining mass as new matter is spontaneously being generated but not getting a chance to vanish back to where it came from. This means that eventually the cosmic expansion will halt and be reversed. This universe could end not in heat death but a big crunch. We may have the final answer in the ultimate fate of the universe if this theory is correct.

Re:Con CERN

[TapeCutter]

There was some concern of the hypothetical danger creation of such black holes might pose.

More concerning to me was the uninformed speculation that lead to those concerns. As one physicist quipped here on Slashdot at the time, "You misunderstand what motivates physicists. If the LHC did get sucked up by a mini black hole we would not run from the building in fear, we would run towards it with notebooks at hand".

Doesn't it violate the laws of thermodynamics?

[master_p]

In Physics we learn that energy/matter cannot be created or destroyed, just change form, and that the universe is a closed system where the total energy/matter is static.

Recently we have also learned that virtual particles are constantly appearing and then disappearing and the void of space is not really a void but a boiling soup of virtual particles. But since these particles disaappear instantly after they appear, the net result is that the universe's energy/matter quantity does not change.

However, the idea in this article claims the opposite: virtual particles, i.e. the quantum foam, does not disappear, but it is added instead to the energy/matter of the universe, thus making the universe an open system. Isn't that a violation of the known physics laws?