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)."
Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction Plan (Score:5, Funny)
Some time ago, I had one of my minions to compose a list of possible ways of destroying the Earth [ucam.org]. Back then, he rated the "microscopic black hole plan" as follows:
You will need: a microscopic black hole having enough mass not to evaporate instantly. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Feasibility rating: 2/10. Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
However, now it seems that we're a step closer to accomplishing this, so i might have him revise the list.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Funny)
I just want sharks with frikken laserbeams attached to their heads!
How original... (Score:3, Insightful)
Queue the predictable Austin Powers quotes.
One flaw (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither is the entire Earth.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually: You need one big enough to evaporate more slowly than it absorbs matter on its trip. Given the tiny cross-section of even quite massive black holes and high radiation rates when they're small, this is a moderately large - and extremely massive - object.
The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the centre of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a might come to rest at the core due to the resistance of the matter it passes through, [...]
As it absorbs the matter it also absorbs its momentum. If it absorbs any non-trivial amount of material on its way through it doesn't get near the surface even on the high point of its first half-orbit.
[...] but it'll have riddled the planet full of holes long before then
Except very near the surface the planet will have collapsed the holes as fast as they form.
Also, it has to be moderately large by the time it gets to a near-stop at the core. While it's orbiting at about planetary diameter it's passing through lots of stuff. Once it's at the core it's depending on the pressure to push stuff to it. So it has to be big enough by then that the absorbtion from pressure beats the losses through hawking radiation.
But even if it evaporates it will have converted a significant mass to energy. Do this enough and something that wouldn't detectably affect the planetary radius could cause a LOT of volcanism - at some geologic time later when the heat makes it to the surface.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Interesting)
Would such a construct be a useful direct mass to energy conversion device? Or would it just irradiate all the mass in the vicinity, producing lots of radioactive crap to get rid of?
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Funny)
I doubt that many slashdotters will make it to heaven.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Funny)
My God! It's every physics textbook I've ever read!
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Funny)
Oh look, the karma is running away. Bye karma, bye bye karma.
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't wory about it yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
now we get modded up for copying one sentence in the text, not just the entire article.
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, whe
Re:Don't wory about it yet... (Score:3, Informative)
What was not known was the actual temperature and compression required for starting fusion of (light) nuclei like hydrogen and nitrogen. Possibility of hydrogen fusion was investicated since the start of the project. And since nitrogen fusion was presumed to operate in some stars, the remote possibility of igniting fusion in earth a
Re:it's been written (Score:3)
Re:Yet another milestone in my Earth Destruction P (Score:3, Funny)
I really hope that this is just a joke
The bit about the evil minions didn't tip you off?
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the interesting thing is that we only have theories about black holes, no direct evidence. Not only that, but black holes push the boundaries of our understanding of physics. AFAIK, we've never directly observed hawking radiation, and so we don't even know that it has to exist. We only theorize that it really should because it fits what we know so far of relativity and quantum mechanics.
So, if they actually did manage to create a small black hole, and then it evaporate, we have our first direct evidence that hawking radiation is real.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Given history it's probably a
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Useful information, you know.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
"Black Hole" is 9th level, I'd guess, so the maxxed out fireball won't tell us more than we already know (that they're probably past 18th.)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Black holes do not "suck". Most people -- even most smart people -- have this impression that black holes suck in everything around them with some sort of unstoppable force. This is completely inaccurate.
Black holes only influence things by their gravity. The force a black hole exerts on another object depends on their masses and the distance between them. Exactly the same as the gravitational force between any other two objects, black hole or no.
The part that makes black holes weird is that they can be significantly smaller (as measured by their event horizon) than normal objects. So if you've got an object with the mass of the Sun, normally it's quite large, so the distance between you and its center is big, and the gravity can only get so strong. If you compress that mass into a black hole, though, you can get much, much closer to its center. If you're only a few kilometers away from the center of gravity of something with the Sun's mass, *then* the gravity will be really strong.
When it comes to very small black holes -- especially the type that might be created by a particle accelerator, with masses far less than that of a single atom -- the mass involved is so miniscule that you'd have to get within femtometers or less before the strength of the gravity would even be noticeable.
Now, *if* black holes were indestructible, eternal objects, then yes, even a small one would eventually pick up enough stray neutrinos to start growing, and could eventually become a threat. But, Hawking radiation takes care of that. In fact, the rate of "evaporation" of a black hole *increases* as the black hole shrinks. So micro-black holes would be very short lived, and, again, therefore not a problem.
Here's the wikipedia article on Hawking radiation [wikipedia.org] for reference.
Re:hmm (Score:3)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Stable black hole? (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering these are quantum issues, what are the odds?
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
I believe it was in "A Brief History Of Time" I read that a black hole with the mass of a mountain would emit hawking radiation equivalent to 1000 times humanities combined power output.
Therefore, you could not artificially create one without having many times humanities power output, as you would have to cram whatever matter you wanted to put into the black hole against the force of all that hawking radiation.
So I think the earth is safe from these mad scientists. For now.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, just found this: SpellBound [sourceforge.net]
Re:NINJAS! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently, someone did the math and it takes a black hole as massive as a mountain, or something like that, to not disappear. Until we can create black holes that large from the very beginning i'd say we're safe.
From the Article.. (Score:5, Funny)
Euh? Does that make it 10 million seconds?
Re:From the Article.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbe [wikipedia.org]
Re:From the Article.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From the Article.. (Score:3, Funny)
Ten to twenty-three seconds? That's a lot longer!
Turns out that they made a markup error, wrapping the "-23" with <UP></UP> instesad of <SUP></SUP>.
When reached for comment on the error, the New Scientist web editor quipped, "Whas sup?"
I for one.... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
By my calculations (Score:5, Funny)
Don't panic. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't panic. (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
Same as my stomach (Score:5, Funny)
The same thing happens when I eat at Taco Bell, but no one has claimed my stomach is a black hole.
Re:Same as my stomach (Score:3, Interesting)
(Not strictly a joke, by the way. The literal translation of "black hole" was one of the common euphemisms for the body part in question in Russian, about the time the physics phenomenon was first being figured out. That made it difficult for the Russions to work on it. Black hole research remained out of favor in Russian physics departments until Russian physicists came up with a different term for them.)
uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uh oh (Score:3, Informative)
Get the paper here (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the fall of 2001, after John left, CERN issued a press release...
Not sure if the actual statement from him said that they would do it within a year or they would "make an announcement pertaining to this" but if it's indeed the latter, I'd say the "prediction" was satisfied for whatever that is worth. Now it's (possibly) been done, so I guess you could also say that CERN's "prediction" happened also.
Seems Titor's technique was to pick up on some things that were just coming into the fringe of the public eye but not really making significant news yet and then make a prediction that just basically said "this will be a big deal in a few years". Although this is not terribly hard to do, the fellow did it very well and has hitherto been pretty lucky about his choices.
A Titor of today would probably choose to make sweeping predictions regarding the economic growth of China and the looming energy crisis it will cause. He might make some bold declaration about nuclear power coming back into vogue
Some of his statements were a little too bold and forward looking, though. Tthe US goes into civil war this year according to Titor; however, historically the US political system has survived many tragedies larger than an economic slump or bad apples in power. He also had said that medicine takes a big step backwards and medical advancement slows, which is also historically highly unlikely. If there is all this crisis going on, then historically, medical advancement INCREASES during times of long crisis. Perhaps Titor did not do enough study of history before making some of his predictions. Unfortunately for him, the few bold and horribly wrong predictions will probably collapse the credibility of the hoax. Other than that, it might have been a pretty good one.
can an expert chime in here? (Score:3, Interesting)
and it also says that at these speeds and energy levels (sorta redundant there), gravity is not a concern for these tiny blackholes. So this is my question: if its not a critical level of mass causing an event horizon, disallowing anything but x-rays and the fore-mentioned radiation to escape.. what exactly is causing these black holes to form? Does it have somethjing to do with the petential energy actualizing on such a large scale? (a sortof critical speed instead of mass)
someone help!
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
Better explanation: (Score:5, Informative)
A puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matteA puzzling signal in RHIC experiments has now been explained by two researchers as evidence for a primordial state of nuclear matter believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gerald A. Miller (206-543-2995, miller@phys.washington.edu), have teamed up for the first time to propose a solution to this puzzle. Reporting independently of the RHIC collaborations, they take into account the fact that the low-energy pions produced inside the fireball act more like waves than classical, billiard-ball-like particles; the pions' relatively long wavelengths tend to overlap with other particles in the crowded fireball environment.
This new quantum-mechanical analysis leads the researchers to conclude that a primordial phenomenon has taken place inside the hot, dense RHIC fireballs. According to Miller and Cramer, the strong force is so powerful that the pions are overcome by the attractive forces exerted by neighboring quarks and anti-quarks. As a result, the pions act as nearly massless particles inside the medium.
Such a situation is believed to have existed shortly after the big bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the pions work against the attraction to escape RHIC's primordial fireball, they must convert some of their kinetic energy into mass, restoring their lost weight. But the pions' experience in the hot, dense environment leaves its mark: the strong attractive force (and the absorption of some of the pions in the collision) would make the fireball appear reduced in size to the detectors that record the pions. According to Miller, looking at the fireball using pions is like looking through a distorted lens: the pions see the radius as about 7 fermi (fm), about the radius of an ordinary gold nucleus, while the researchers deduce the true radius of the fireball to be about 11.5 fm (Cramer, Miller, Wu and Yoon, Phys Rev Lett, tent. 18 March 2005).r believed to have accompanied a quark-gluon plasma or similarly exotic matter in the early universe. Colliding two beams of gold nuclei at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, physicists have been striving to make the quark-gluon plasma, a primordial soup of matter in which quarks and gluons circulate freely.
However, the collision fireball has been smaller and shorter-lived than expected, according to two RHIC collaborations (STAR and PHENIX) of pions (the lightest form of quark-antiquark pairs) coming out of the fireball. The collaborations employ the Hanbury-Brown-Twiss method, originally used in astronomy to measure the size of stars. In the subatomic equivalent, spatially separated detectors record pairs of pions emerging from the collision to estimate the size of the fireball.
Now an experimentalist and a theorist, both from the University of Washington, John G. Cramer (206-543-9194, cramer@phys.washington.edu) and Gera
Einstein's Bridge (Score:3, Interesting)
For those who aren't SF fans, I believe this is the same John Cramer who wrote the novel _Einstein's bridge_, about interdimensional gateways created by accident in the Superconducting Supercollider. No, not our abandoned project, but the one in a parallel universe where the SSC wasn't cancelled... and is poking holes into our universe in the middle of the empty Texas pra
Re:Better explanation: (Score:3, Insightful)
great... (Score:3, Funny)
Proof of Time Travel (Score:5, Funny)
It's funny until... (Score:4, Funny)
Reminds me (Score:5, Informative)
Obligatory Futurama reference (Score:5, Funny)
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Implications (Score:4, Funny)
See the RHIC 'atom smasher' in person (Score:3, Informative)
Oh please... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh please... (Score:5, Funny)
*moves Spiderman 2 to top of NetFlix queue*
NO, it was NOT a "Black Hole' (Score:5, Informative)
Want more ? Here is the Home page-Science Lite for the STAR detector [bnl.gov]
Please note also that Dr. Nastase was beating these same drums back in 99. I expect that this paper is science politics- at that level you don't want anyone to think you were wrong, so you will spend significant effort at proving your predictions right, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh, and he's not even on the project- he's sucking down other people's results after the fact.
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 incredib
Not black hole, but the dual of one (Score:5, Informative)
If I understand this correctly, the dual is meant in the sense of the "AdS/CFT-correspondence" [wikipedia.org], which is a mathematical correspondence, or "duality" between a gravitational theory (which may contain black holes) and a "Gauge theory" [wikipedia.org], which is the kind of theory that is used to describe quarks, electrons etc.
The duality means that calculations on black holes may (possibly) be used to understand certain things about this "fireball", but it doesn't mean that the fireball is actually a black hole.
Re:Not black hole, but the dual of one (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, it has nothing to do with gravitational black holes, but the semi-hysterical press stories didn't pick up on that at the time either.
I'd explain it, but follow the link, or try this one [ex.ac.uk] for something clearer and simpler. I got these links from this search [google.com], but not all the results look relevant. Still, you may be able to find more, at least starting there.
Re:Not black hole, but the dual of one (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you. Yours is one of the more useful comments I've seen on /. From the abstract on the arXiv, I think you're correct. The first sentance of the abstract says, "...he fireball observed at RHIC is (the analog of) a dual black hole." I'd say the words "analog of" are key.
It's also important in general to remember that things on the arXiv have not yet been peer reviewed. There's still a lot of good work there, but it should be taken with a grain of salt. Even good, legitimate scientists make mi
May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
*arms flailing*
the greatest discovery of our species history (Score:3, Funny)
Simple
Making black holes occurs sooner in a species technological advancement than interstellar travel.
How can it be Hawking radiation? (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is done in a particle accelerator, which is a vacuum, and the objects with which we're dealing are gluons and other sub-atomic particles, how can their resultant mass be high enough to generate the requisite gravity for such a thing, and from where is the pair made in the vacuum?
At the least, shouldn't the other forces override the strength of gravity by an enormous amount?
Re:How can it be Hawking radiation? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How can it be Hawking radiation? (Score:3, Informative)
Nevertheless, that's not really what's being discussed here
Re:How can it be Hawking radiation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh, thanks for the clarification. I hadn't gone to the New Scientist page because it clearly said it was subscription only. The first couple of paragraphs from the paper are at the New Scientist link, for anyone who didn't check.
The second sentence is "A fireball created in a particle
wtf? (Score:5, Funny)
In technical terms, we call that "burning items to generate heat."
I want to see! (Score:3, Funny)
Holy Back in Black (Score:4, Informative)
Runner-up for Least Reassuring Disclaimer Award (Score:5, Funny)
I can't tell you how much better that makes me feel.
Next you're going to tell me the possibility of a resonance cascade is extremely remote and that you're seeing predictable phase arrays.
Played to the Galactic Darwin Awards audience (Score:4, Funny)
Man made Black Holes ?? (Score:3, Funny)
Quantum computer... (Score:3, Funny)
Not at RHIC, but perhaps the LHC? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider [web.cern.ch]), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured [stanford.edu].
Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.
Re:Hawking radiation? (Score:5, Informative)
The usual blackholes with at least a solar mass will last incomprehensible amounts of time since a particle formed near the event horizon has to somehow escape the blackhole's gravitational grasp and you have to somehow move the entire black hole's enormous mass in this way. Don't hold your breath.
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.
Re:uh oh. Do you realize there's a real danger... (Score:5, Funny)
First we'll hear about the new black hole movie
Disney will re-release "The Black Hole" on DVD
Scientists will explain that it wasn't really a black hole after all, but the major media will not pick up the story because the movie and tv series have already been started and Hollywood will lose too much money
TV mini-series comes out just before the movie
Movie comes out
Dept. of Homeland Security informs everyone that to keep safe from a black hole, buy duct tape and plastic and cover your windows.
Re:uh oh. Do you realize there's a real danger... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Is that shit running? :P (Score:3, Funny)
That would suck!
Way off topic (Score:5, Funny)
No that takes beer.