Black Hole May Destroy Earth: SciScoop April Fools Joke Turns Serious
Physics Wednesday, April 14, 2004 . This is a SciScoop post by James Blodgett
A recent April Fools posting about an artificial black hole destroying earth is no laughing matter.
Recent developments in string theory suggest that upcoming particle colliders may create mini black holes. String theorists have written that colliders will be “black hole factories.” They expect these black holes to evaporate via Hawking radiation. But Hawking radiation has never been observed. It may not work as expected.
The consideration that cosmic rays sometimes strike earth with collider-level energy may not be protective. A mini black hole resulting from a collision between a cosmic ray particle and an earth particle would retain the momentum of the cosmic ray. There is reason to think it would be less reactive than a neutrino. It would zip right through the earth and be gone. The probability of accretion of enough matter in one pass through earth to slow it below escape velocity from earth is low enough so that billions could have been created over the life of the earth with little chance of trouble. On the other hand, some mini black holes resulting from a collision of heavy ions going in opposite directions would be moving at less than escape velocity from earth. They would orbit within earth. Dangerous accretion schedules are plausible.
For references, see www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/links.htm
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4 Responses to Black Hole May Destroy Earth: SciScoop April Fools Joke Turns Serious
jdoe
April 14th, 2004 at 5:12 am
Yet Another Self-Promotion Post
apsmith
April 15th, 2004 at 8:29 am
Apparently this has been pointed out by Martin Rees. Still, it seems rather unlikely…
jxliv7
April 15th, 2004 at 1:57 pm
.
My knowledge of back holes (which may have been sucked in already) is that they are simply extremely high gravity objects in space that pull everything nearby (think Earth) into them. If that’s the case, then “small” black holes would get “bigger” and “bigger” until the Earth is gone. In other words, the creation of a black hole in a collider would be an instantaneous and inevitable self destruction.
I see only one “out”, and that’s if black holes are usually formed from dying, collapsing stars, that’s a lot of energy — and a collider just doesn’t produce that much.
However, IANAP (I am not a physicist), so it’s only my opinion (not the self promotion seen on SciScoop lately).
teece
April 15th, 2004 at 11:22 pm
This is a common misconception.
A black hole is not a ’super-sucker.’ It does not suck everything in, no more than the Moon, Earth, or Sun does.
Say we just now turned the Sun magically into a into a black hole (Not via the normal process of stellar collapse, so that the mass of the Sun stayed the same). What would change? Other than the fact that we would no longer get light (and thus would all die :-), the answer is: NOTHING! All the planets would still orbit the Sun, just as before. The Sun would have the same mass (in a much smaller area, maybe zero, maybe not, our theories aren’t certain). There would be a point beyond which stuff couldn’t return (the event horizon). But otherwise, stuff would go on like before.
Thus these mini black holes would be no more gravitationally attractive than whatever their mass was. Of course, because of their bizarre nature, they would be able to keep accumulating mass. So if one were formed in the atmosphere, perhaps it could actually keep accumulating mass (mostly via collisions, I suspect), so that perhaps it would be a problem eventually, as it kept getting heavier and heavier. But it wouldn’t just immediately ’suck everything in.’
I used to think the same way. Hope that helps.