- Mini Black Holes Easier To Make Than ThoughtLiveScience.com - 16 hours agoParticle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider could create black holes using less energy than previously thought, new models suggest.
- Huffington Post - 13 hours ago
Mini Black Holes Easier To Make Than Thought - Yahoo! News
news.yahoo.com/mini-black-holes-easier-thought-172430218.html12 hours ago – From Yahoo! News: Creating microscopic black holes using particle accelerators requires less energy than previously thought, researchers ...Mini Black Holes Easier To Create Than Thought, But Still No Threat ...
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/.../mini-black-holes_n_2860926.htm...13 hours ago – By Lizzie Wade Back in 2008, physicists repeatedly assured us that a black hole produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was not going ...Micro black hole - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_holeMicro black holes, also called quantum mechanical black holes or mini black holes, are hypothetical tiny black holes, for which quantum mechanical effects play ...Mini Black Holes Easier To Make Than Thought
Charles Choi, LiveScience ContributorDate: 12 March 2013 Time: 09:36 AM ET
Creating microscopic black holes using particle accelerators requires less energy than previously thought, researchers say.A snapshot from a video showing two particles being slammed into each other and distorting into pancake shapes before forming a black hole.
CREDIT: Matt Choptuik, Will East, Frans Pretorius.
If physicists do succeed in creating black holes with such energies on Earth, the achievement could prove the existence of extra dimensions in the universe, physicists noted.
Any such black holes would pose no risk to Earth, however, scientists added.
Black holes possess gravitational fields so powerful that nothing can escape, not even light. The holes normally form when the remains of a dead star collapse under their own gravity, squeezing their mass together.
A number of theories about the universe suggest the existence of extra dimensions of reality, each folded up into sizes ranging from as tiny as a proton to as big as a fraction of a millimeter. At distances comparable to the sizes of these extra dimensions, these models suggest gravity may become far stronger than normal. As such, atom smashers could cram enough energy together to generate black holes. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]
When the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider, was coming online, scientists wondered if it might become a "black hole factory," generating a black hole as often as every second. Particles zip at high speeds around the 17-mile (27 kilometer) circular atom smasher before colliding into one another to create explosive energies. At its maximum, each particle beam the collider fires packs as much energy as a 400-ton train traveling at about 120 mph (195 km/h).
How to create a black hole
So far, researchers have detected no black holes at the Large Hadron Collider. Still, theoretical interest in this possibility remains alive. Now, using supercomputers, researchers simulating collisions among particles zipping near the speed of light have shown that black holes could form at lower energies than previously thought.
This new discovery is rooted in Einstein's theory of relativity. First, through his famous equation E = mc2, Einstein revealed that mass and energy are related. This means the greater the energy of a particle — say, the faster a particle gets accelerated in a collider — the greater its mass becomes.
Next, Einstein's theory explains that mass curves the fabric of space and time, generating the phenomenon known as gravity. As particles zip along within particle colliders, they warp space-timeand can focus energy much as glass lenses focus light.
When two particles collide, each one can focus the energy of the other. If scientists use models based on classical relativity that exclude notions of extra dimensions, "one might expect black hole formation at one-third the energy" than previously expected, researcher Frans Pretorius, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, told LiveScience.
Still, conventional physics suggest it would take a quadrillion, or a million-billion, times more energy to form a microscopic black hole than the Large Hadron Collider is capable of, so even a third of that is beyond human reach. Scenarios based on extra dimensions could have black holes form at a lower energy, "but they make no concrete predictions on what it should be," Pretorius said.
CREDIT: Matt Choptuik, Will East, Frans Pretorius.
Risk-free black holes
As frightening as black holes might seem, if particle accelerators on Earth can generate them, such infinitesimal entities pose no risk to the planet.
"The one common misconception about the small black holes that may form at the Large Hadron Collider is that they would swallow the Earth," Pretorius said. "With about as much confidence as we can say anything in science, this is completely impossible."
To start with, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking calculated all black holes should lose mass over time, giving it off as so-called Hawking radiation. Tiny black holes should shrink via such evaporation faster than they grow by gobbling up matter, dying within a fraction of a second, before they could engorge on any significant amount of matter.
Even if one assumes Hawking is wrong and that black holes are more stable than that, the tiny black holes would pose no danger. Because the microscopic black holes would be created within a particle accelerator, they should keep enough speed to escape from Earth's gravity. Moreover, if any get trapped, they are so tiny it would take each one more than the current age of the universe to destroy even a milligram of Earth matter.
"These black holes would be too small to consume any significant amount of matter," Pretorius said.
Pretorius and his colleague William East detailed their findings online March 7 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Follow LiveScience us on Twitter @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
end quote from:I think this question needs to be asked: "Since Black holes are at the center of literally every galaxy and they are the gravity which actually holds galaxies together, Why is this?"2nd: "How big does a micro black hole have to be to create something that would suck the whole world into it?"I think before everyone starts making micro black holes a lot more important questions like this need to be asked. In a way little black holes likely have certain dynamics just like big black holes and for scientists to be surprised could end a building, a city, a county, a country or even a planet if people didn't fully understand the dynamics of such a thing fully. We are in uncharted territory here, at least for Earth born Humans in the last several thousands of years.So, just like when people started making Nuclear weapons during World War II people need to think carefully about the potential consequences of building such things even if they are very little. If you can build little ones you can also build bigger ones, and what if crazy terrorists learn how to make some bigger ones who don't care if everyone dies because they want to create Armageddon so they can see God?
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Mini black holes relatively easy to make
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