Just damn.
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Posted on 03/17/2005 12:59:33 PM PST by flashbunny
A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.
It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at near light speeds.
Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
His work has been published on the pre-print website arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine.
When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken down into particles called quarks and gluons.
These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the beam collisions.
But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says there is something unusual about it.
Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball as were predicted by calculations.
The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking" radiation.
However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole, it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole.
Remember the movie I believe was titled "A Crack in the World?" This sorta reminds me of it. Ah me, I watch and read way too much sci fi. :)
1-(6+9+9)=-23
Yeah, if they by a billion 10^9, I think that's right.
10 millionths of a billionth of a billionth =
(10^1) * (10^-6) * (10^-9) * (10^-9) =
10 ^ (1 - (6 + 9 + 9)) = 10 ^ (1 - 24) = 10^-23
Or 1 over 10 raised to the 23rd power (1 followed by 23 zeros). If they're using the british meaning of million and billion, then it's 1 / 10 ^ (1-(9+6+6)), or 1/10^20.
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, LOL.
Oops, just saw your post.
In any case, what this reporter wrote is basically incomprehesible.
"Hawkins Radiation" happens over long, long time scales.
It does not happen in billionths of a second.
So the thermal radiation "observed" is NOT Hawkins radiation from a black hole.
On the other hand, I'm sure some alien civilizations in the universe are snuffed out once in a while when a physics experiment goes wrong.
No, Cosm was different. I read that one, too.
Cosm was a universe-in-a-bubble that was observable from our side, but there was no way of entering or leaving it.
If anyone's interested here's a paper written on black hole production in colliders. Looking at the lower right hand graph on page 2, it's quite clear this type of black hole, if produced, is completely harmless.
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C010630/papers/P321.PDF
Yepper..
I read all about it in a Marvel comic book..
Survivors tried to take over the earth, but they were only like, 1/8" tall..
A dog ate 'em..
For a normal type black hole (which are still theoretical, although there's reasonably good evidence for them now, but whether they actually contain a singularity or not is not know) containing the mass of at least several of our suns, Hawking (as in Stephen Hawking, who postulated this type of radiation) would take an extremely long time, probably longer than our universe has existed so far. However, for a singularity with a mass of only a few gold nuclei, or part of one, it could conceivably occur very quickly. This is way out on the fringes of theoretical physics, though, and quite possibly there is a simpler explanation. Pretty crazy stuff if true, though.
Yeah..
Quite clear to YOU, maybe..
Me, I'm packin' clean underwear, just in case..
Just like my momma taught me..
Hawking finally had to admit there isn't any...
bump (did anyone hear a loud bang?)
But when black holes are outlawed, only outlaws will have black holes.
They can have my black hole when they pry it from my cold dead hands!
There's no event horizon? News to me. Is there not a distance from the center (or singularity, if they exist) of the black hole at which the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light? If there's no event horizon can there be Hawking radiation?
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
... All of which proves the Democrats are right to fight for a weak, vacillating America. Did Michael Moore write it?
Benford's Cosm wasn't about creating a blacxk hole - they created a baby universe.
But still, the novel this makes me think of the most is Earth by David Brin.
A physicist is hired by some Sotuh American generals to create a quantum black hole in order to harness it for cheap power. Enviro-fanatics storm the complex and cut the power from the containment field.
Black hole falls into the earth, and choas ensues.
Good book. But then again I haven't read anything by David Brin that I didn't like - he's a scientist who knows how to spin a really good yarn.
/sci-fi geek for 30 years and counting!
"quantum singularity" ping
bump for later
I read a good short story in one of the "The Year's Best Science Fiction" collections (edited by Gardner Dozois) a couple of years ago where they accidentally create a micro black hole on the moon's surface in the course of some sort of high-energy physics. It falls to the center of the moon, and then past it, and then back again, and again, chewing up the moon and growing as it goes, hollowing the moon out. Eventually they end up with a moon-mass black hole orbiting the earth. Interesting concept.
a reassuring formulation.
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