Could Atom-Sized Black Holes Be Detected in Our Solar System? (scientificamerican.com) 59
Scientific American has surprising news about the possibility of black holes the size of an atom but containing the mass of an asteroid — the so-called "primordial black holes" formed after the birth of the universe which could solve the ongoing mystery of the missing dark matter.
These atom-sized black holes "may fly through the inner solar system about once a decade, scientists say... And if they sneak by the moon or Mars, scientists should be able to detect them, a new study shows." If one of these black holes comes near a planet or large moon, it should push the body off course enough to be measurable by current instruments. "As it passes by, the planet starts to wobble," says Sarah R. Geller, a theoretical physicist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of the study, which was published on September 17 in Physical Review D. "The wobble will grow over a few years but eventually it will damp out and go back to zero."
Study team member Tung X. Tran, then an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a computer model of the solar system to see how the distance between Earth and nearby solar system objects would change after a black hole flyby. He found that such an effect would be most noticeable for Mars, whose distance scientists know within about 10 centimeters. For a black hole in the middle of the mass range, "we found that after three years the signal would grow to between one to three meters," Tran says. "That's way above the threshold of precision that we can measure." The Earth-Mars distance is particularly well tracked because scientists have been sending generations of probes and landers to the Red Planet...
In a coincidence, an independent team published a paper about its search for signs of primordial black holes flying near Earth in the same issue of Physical Review D. The researchers' simulations found that such signals could be detectable in orbital data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems, as well as gravimeters that measure variations in Earth's gravitational field.
"For decades physicists thought dark matter was likely to take the form of so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)," the article points out. "Yet generations of ever more sensitive experiments meant to find these particles have come up empty."
California astrophysicist Kevork Abazajian tells the site that now in the scientific community, "Primordial black holes are really gaining popularity."
These atom-sized black holes "may fly through the inner solar system about once a decade, scientists say... And if they sneak by the moon or Mars, scientists should be able to detect them, a new study shows." If one of these black holes comes near a planet or large moon, it should push the body off course enough to be measurable by current instruments. "As it passes by, the planet starts to wobble," says Sarah R. Geller, a theoretical physicist now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of the study, which was published on September 17 in Physical Review D. "The wobble will grow over a few years but eventually it will damp out and go back to zero."
Study team member Tung X. Tran, then an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built a computer model of the solar system to see how the distance between Earth and nearby solar system objects would change after a black hole flyby. He found that such an effect would be most noticeable for Mars, whose distance scientists know within about 10 centimeters. For a black hole in the middle of the mass range, "we found that after three years the signal would grow to between one to three meters," Tran says. "That's way above the threshold of precision that we can measure." The Earth-Mars distance is particularly well tracked because scientists have been sending generations of probes and landers to the Red Planet...
In a coincidence, an independent team published a paper about its search for signs of primordial black holes flying near Earth in the same issue of Physical Review D. The researchers' simulations found that such signals could be detectable in orbital data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems, as well as gravimeters that measure variations in Earth's gravitational field.
"For decades physicists thought dark matter was likely to take the form of so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)," the article points out. "Yet generations of ever more sensitive experiments meant to find these particles have come up empty."
California astrophysicist Kevork Abazajian tells the site that now in the scientific community, "Primordial black holes are really gaining popularity."
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I find that "Black Hole" is a very racist term. Why hasn't this been fixed yet?
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It has been fixed, they are called White Holes. Carlo Rovelli has a book called, suspiciously enough, "White Holes". And it can be yours from Amazon for about $15.
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Lets build the detectors now!
*Let's. i.e. "let us". "Let us build the detectors now!". Common mistake.
'Lets' means someone permits you to do something. "The government lets its local businesses build the detectors."
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Is it offensive to recall an old joke: what is your favorite salad? "lettuce, turnip, and pea"? See how creative people get with testing the fault tolerance of natural language?
Hmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
If these black holes are so small and so old, wouldn't the Hawking's radiation have destroyed them by now?
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It depends on the size. Primordial black holes are generally described as having "about the mass of an asteroid". Initially there would have been smaller ones too, but any ones much smaller than that would have evaporated by now.
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
If these black holes are so small and so old, wouldn't the Hawking's radiation have destroyed them by now?
No.
TFA says 10^17 to 10^23 grams.
Even at the lower mass, the lifetime would be 1.5e18 years.
That's a hundred million times the current lifetime of the universe.
Hawking Radiation Calculator [vttoth.com]
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O, good. Someone who can criticize my theory.
I propose that micro black-holes can never truly evaporate, because when they get small enough, they no longer have a large enough capture cross-section to swallow halves of virtual particles.
If this isn't plausible, I'd like to know why.
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Thank you. And also thanks to qeveren.
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Yes... The smaller the black hole, the quicker it evaporates.
"A black hole of one solar mass (M = 2.0×1030 kg) takes more than 10^67 years to evaporate—much longer than the current age of the universe at 1.4×10^10 years. But for a black hole of 10^11 kg, the evaporation time is 2.6×10^9 years."
THE PART YOU CARE ABOUT: "This is why some astronomers are searching for signs of exploding primordial black holes. "
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Interesting things I learned when reading up on hawking radiation:
For a 1-solar-mass black hole, the theoretical hawking radiation is practically undetectable. Think "single-digit photons per year." To put it another way, not a single particle of hawking radiation has been measured. The cosmic microwave background radiation of space is positively incandescent compared to the temperature of a solar mass black hole.
My guess.... (Score:2)
I think the "mass of an asteroid" is an overestimate. And I think that "Hawking radiation" is part of the reason why.
Hawking radiation is caused when half of a pair of virtual particles is swallowed by a black hole. If the black hole is small *enough* it won't be able to capture anything. So I think that black holes never totally evaporate, they just get small enough that they can no longer capture halves of virtual pairs. Among other things, this eliminates the problems with "naked singularities". (Th
No (Score:3)
The answer is No.
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I kind of concur.
I don't think black holes with that mass can exist for even a second. If it takes a certain amount of mass for a black hole to occur naturally, i e several solar masses worth. Maybe it is possible to create one artificially with lower mass, but I think when a black hole evaporates to under a certain mass it will no longer be able to sustain itself and hence explode. At least that's what feels natural to me.
But every now and again, I get to experience some things that turns out to be counter
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Explodating black hole, it is possible that such an event would create an oscillating white hole - black hole object, that would be cool. Worth at least a 10 kilowords science fiction short story.
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You can calculate the expected lifetime, and it's long enough. But the conditions to create such an object don't exist in the current time. Maybe it was possible in the early times? I'm just a lay person so I wouldn't know :)
Primordial [Re:No] (Score:5, Informative)
You can calculate the expected lifetime, and it's long enough. But the conditions to create such an object don't exist in the current time. Maybe it was possible in the early times?
Yes, that's why they're sometimes referred to as "primordial" black holes; they were (hypothesized to have been) created in the early universe, when it was still hot and dense, moments after the big bang.
Whether the conditions of the early universe would in fact have created such black holes is still debated.
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But we know that supermassive Black Holes exist at the center of almost all galaxies, and cosmologists have no idea how those supermassive Black Holes formed. There are some hypotheses about them, but none of them is well established. But they are examp
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I don't find supermassive black holes in the center of a galaxy at all strange. I think it's only a natural conclusion of what a strong gravitational force would do to a lot of nearby mass.
In a three dimensional gravity image of a galaxy it's nothing more than a rotating funnel. If the glutton in the center has a lot of food it will get fat, unless the table is spinning the food away from it faster than it can suck it in.
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Would citing "Betteridge's Law of Headlines" count as a reason?
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Or maybe it's just an asteroid (Score:2)
What is the difference in the impact on Mars between an asteroid-mass black hole and an asteroid of the same mass?
Sure, we can detect some asteroids but space is vast and if you don't know exactly where to look and the asteroid is neither blocking something else nor reflecting energy in your direction, it's going to be pretty hard to detect.
So, if you find a small change to Mars's orbit as described here, and you can't find an asteroid that might cause it, is it a black hole, is it an asteroid, or is it som
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According to TFA, the upper bound is 10^20 kilograms, close to the size of the largest asteroids and a thousand times the mass of Phobos, the larger of the two Martian moons.
There's no way we'd miss an asteroid of that size if it were close to Mars.
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I hope this doesn't sound as dumb as injecting bleach, but this story made me wonder if primordial black holes might help explain our magnetic poles drifting or flipping. They're saying that we could detect a wobble if one zipped by... if it wobbled the earth, wouldn't it wobble the big, molten magnet at the center of earth even more?
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Presumably a black hole this small in an impact with Mars would pretty much just punch a pinhole through the planet with both the black hole and the planet remaining relatively unscathed, but it's hard to say. The event horizon on the black hole would be so tiny, it's not going to do anything like start sucking in mass until it consumes the planet. It might be too small for individual atoms to even fit in the first place.
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What is the difference in the impact on Mars between an asteroid-mass black hole and an asteroid of the same mass?
Well, if an asteroid strikes Mars, the asteroid will be violently decelerated from its current speed to close to 0 relative to Mars. Most of the asteroid's kinetic energy will be absorbed by the planet, with very observable consequences. By contrast, (AIUI) an asteroid-mass black hole will interact very weakly with the planet; it will fly right through and continue on its way with almost the same speed. Since very little energy will be transferred, the effect on Mars of the "impact" should be almost negligi
CERN is testing it live right now (Score:2, Troll)
CERN lab is isolating an atom size black hole at their super collider in Switzerland right now .. check out the live view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Tick tock (Score:2)
Can they grow? (Score:3)
Alternate question: what would happen if one of these went into (or through?) a planet?
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Likely not a lot would happen. Remember, these black holes would be tiny. They only have the gravity of an asteroid, so at atomic scales they would have little gravitational effect on atoms sitting right next to them. So consuming a single atom would take a direct collision and they may be so small that would be very unlikely. It may even be possible that their event horizon is too small to even consume an atom. One could picture atoms that actually do get close enough to be caught in their gravity simply s
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If it's small enough, it could feasibly orbit the center of mass of a planet without interacting too much. If the radius of the event horizon is small enough, it'll "eat" just one atom at a time and not grow in a meaningful way at any timescale that's relevant to us. Any radiation would be absorbed by the surrounding planetary material.
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>I thought black holes sucked up everything that got close to them.
While that is the popular depiction, it's entirely incorrect. Black holes do 'consume' anything that passes their event horizon (and do some nasty stuff to things that just get too close), but they 'suck' no more than the Earth does. Just like the ISS (or the Moon) haven't been sucked down to Earth, you can pass by a black hole and your course will bend without you falling in unless you're too close, too slow, or already heading straigh
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It would be very bad. [space.com]
The worst case is if it manages to lodge inside the planet. In that case, it would start pulling in matter from the planet, grow quickly, and eventually absorb the whole planet. No more Earth.
Fortunately, that's considered very unlikely. Primordial black holes are expected to be moving really fast. Much more likely it would just punch a hole through and continue on its way.
Unfortunately, that would still release a lot of energy. More than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Yo
How do they form in the first place? (Score:2)
You need the mass of a large star to create the gravity required to form a black hole so how can something with the mass of an asteroid ever form? Have they radiated away most of their mass?
Re:How do they form in the first place? (Score:4, Informative)
These are primordial black holes formed when the big bang was fresh and the mean density (of both matter and energy) of the universe was quite high.
While gravitational collapse is currently by far the most likely means that a black hole might form, and requires a mass larger than our sun to actually do it, there's no reason why in the hotter and denser early universe that something like a magnetic pinch couldn't force a smaller mass to a high enough density to become a black hole.
I want my grade retroactively improved! (Score:2)
Or or, Dark Matter does not exist :/ (Score:1)
One should top inventing unicorns to make a man-made hypothesis work.
Known Space Unknowns? (Score:1)
Where are Beowulf Shaefer, Carlos Wu and Sigmund Ausfaller when we really, really need them?
Start Looking At CERN (Score:2)
Atom sized black holes (Score:2)
Hell, most tech CEOs fit this description. There, found them for you.
Deja Q (Score:2)
Obviously the result of a large celestial object passing through at near right angles to the plane of the star system... probably a black hole...
Finally! (Score:1)
I've never really liked the notion of dark matter, and this is a very nice and elegant solution. I approve.