Here's what would happen to you if you encountered a small black hole

C-Net ^ | July 16, 2015 12:26 PM PDT | by Anthony Domanico

[Swordmaker]

Video—What if there was a black hole in your pocket?

Could you survive being close to a black hole the size of a nickel? Seriously though, how grisly would your death be and what would such a phenomena mean for the future of the Earth?

A new video from the folks at Kurz Gesagt posted July 16 tries to answer those questions with some helpful animations. The video explores a few different assumptions, as the impact of the black hole would depend on whether its size was based on the mass or width of a nickel. Either way, if a black hole developed anywhere near you, you would certainly die, but the impact on the Earth would be drastically different.

The video argues that a black hole with the mass of a nickel would radiate away all of its mass almost instantly, leading to an explosion about three times bigger than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Needless to say, that would devastate a good portion of the Earth, but it's nowhere near as destructive as a black hole that's as wide as a nickel.

A black hole as wide as a nickel would be slightly more massive than the Earth, and would devour the entire thing, leaving nothing but a flat disk of hot rock in its wake. The black hole would then take the Earth's place orbiting around the sun, but not before sending several asteroids into the solar system to crash into various planets for the next few million years.

But you and the rest of humanity will be long dead by then, so what happens after that really doesn't concern us, right? Watch the video above to get a better sense of black-hole science and why we should thank our lucky stars that the likelihood of such an event happening on or near Earth is astronomically small.

[Don W]

The idiocy that got me was the babbling about the huge explosion 3 times Hiroshima/Nagasaki. That works out to about 150 kilotons.

Pretty small potatoes compared to say, Novaya Zemlya, and that rather large blast was insignificant on a stellar scale.

[Swordmaker]

The tines the power of Hiroshima would devastate a good portion of the earth? Got it. This is obviously real physics.

You've got to keep the Luddites and the low information crowd scared of science and atomic energy, you know. . . exaggeration and always, always invoke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bugaboos. Short circuits logic every time in what laughingly passes for their minds.

[rikkir]

Oddly, the density of a black hole is inversely proportional to the square of its mass; a black hole with the mass of the universe would be about the size of the universe.

Would it’s gravitational force be inversely proportionate as well?

If so why couldn’t the theory be made that the Universe is a giant black hole, and Dark Matter, and Dark Energy are the by-products, or building blocks if you like.

We know what happens at the entrance to the black hole, but not what the interior is.

If this is too dumb a question please chide accordingly. As you can obviously tell, I am not an Astrophysicist.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I am not an astrophysicist, either. Your questions are generally provocative and intelligent, and I do not have solid answers. I don’t want to confuse you with speculation. What ever little I know about anything, I learned by persistent and open minded inquiry. Good luck.

[rikkir]

Thank you sir. You are a gentleman, and a scholar!

[alexander_busek]

The idiocy that got me was the babbling about the huge explosion 3 times Hiroshima/Nagasaki. That works out to about 150 kilotons.

More like: 40 to 50 kilotons.

But yes: Still small potatoes!

Regards,

[alexander_busek]

Sorry, each bomb dropped on Japan had a yield of about 12 - 15 kt. So three times the COMBINED explosive yield (as cited in the article) would approach 100 kt.

Regards,