Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

BBC News ^ | 3/17/2005

[flashbunny]

Lab fireball 'may be black hole'

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.

[ThanhPhero]

10 million, billion, billionths of a second is 10 million seconds=115.74 days. 10 million-billion-billionths of a second is a little smaller.

[muir_redwoods]

I blame Bush

[King Prout]

naw... it ain't dangerous

[roaddog727]

Angstroms and Nanometers, or is it picometers

[FierceDraka]

Yeah, Gardner Dozois always does the best "Year's Best" anthologies.

But I'd miss the Moon of that happened. Instead of the familiar, pearl-colored ball of rock we all know and love, there would be a blazing, eye-searing accretion disk spewing out x-rays and Hawking radiation. No thanks! LOL

But seriously, I question the wisdom of carrying out such research anywhere in cislunar space, much less in a heavily populated region like New York.

How about this - carry on the research in orbit around Jupiter. If something goes wrong, the black hole falls into Jupiter, "stellarizes" the planet, and Presto! We've got Europa and Ganymede warmed up, and ready for colonization and terraforming. (Io would be too hot, Callisto too cold)

"We don' need no steenking black Monoleeth!"

Can't you tell I have quite a bit of time on my hands at work tonight? LOL

[King Prout]

AAAARGH!

you beat me to it.

[King Prout]

hey, Draka! longtime no see.

[chief_bigfoot]

don't forget the 50/50-95 rule. If there's a 50/50 chance of choosing the correct answer, 95% of the time you'll choose wrong

[DoctorMichael]

What if a group of scientists working in particle acceleration lab created a BLACK HOLE that was above some level of stabilty (ie. large enough that it didn't immediately dissolve because of Hawking Radiation)?

Sorry, but your premise is flawed. The lifetime.....

The funding agency nonetheless stopped all research to give their overseers a chance to double-check all the calculations before allowing the researcher to continue with the experiment. Their thought process was as I described ie. What if........?

Better to be safe than sorry.

[-YYZ-]

Assuming it got loose, and I have no idea if a micro black hole can be contained, presumably some much like the scenario I described above from a sci-fi short story: it would fall from the surface towards the center of the earth, and keep right on going towards the other side, and then swing back and forth repeatedly and steadily, accumulating mass as it went, hollowing out the earth. Eventually the whole earth would collapse into it and we'd all be killed. The earth would become a low mass micro black hole in orbit around the sun, with the moon in orbit around it, with everything continuing much as before, except that the earth as we know it would be gone. Not a pleasant prospect.

[TheLion]

How do you get days out of billionths of a second?

[TheLion]

"If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball"

At 10 million, billion, billionths of a second, you better be quick!

[DoctorMichael]

.......whole earth would collapse into it and we'd all be killed......

This is what was most likely on the minds of those in charge of the research grant money and particle accelerator time. I was merely relating an article on similar experiments I had read 5 years or so years ago.

This stuff is all kinda 'out there' and I'm sure they just said, "Whoa. Wait a minute", before allowing the research to continue. If there was a small infinitesimal chance (ie. NOT absolutely zero) of this happening, they wanted to err on the side of caution.

[JasonC]

Cosm by Gregory Benford is a better story...

[JasonC]

Hawking radiation is essentially the idea that just outside where you'd expect an event horizon on general relativity physics, you get a quantum field theory effect not predicted by GR. Which is basically pair production from breakdown of the vaccum itself. As pairs (electron positron to keep it simple - it generalizes to others) of virtual particles pop into existence in a boundary layer near the hole, one of them has a world line that leads into the BH and another has one that leads out (some cross section has this characteristic etc). Thus you get particles that seem to come out of the hole, while their virtual "twins" fall into it. Thus the surface of the E.H. in GR terms is not "black", but emits radiation as a spectrum of "created" particles out of the vaccum. Meanwhile the BH loses mass-energy as net antimatter goes into the hole (effectively). BH entropy is as high as possible - completely disordered, no info about prior state preserved. So the stuff coming out is completely entropic aka black body. If the mass of the BH is high, this "unblackness" of the hole aka QFT driven "leakage" of mass-energy out of the hole, is very small. If that mass is small, the leakage rate may be high compared to the mass of the hole. Otherwise put, massive holes have huge "evaporation lifetimes" - well over the age of the universe - but small ones have modest ones and are appreciably "non-black". The idea here is that particle production seen in an accelerator event might have reflected a tiny mass hole that evaporated rapidly. But they are probably guessing and other ways of accounting for whatever event they are referring to, may well be possible.

FWIW.

[RightWingAtheist]

The author is physicist Dr. John Cramer of the University of Washington, who writes "The Alternative View" column for Analog, and came up with the "transactional" model of quantum mechanics.

[RightWingAtheist]

I remember it; I'm also reminded of a great early fifties movie called The Magnetic Monster, which in spite of its title, is an intelligent, engrossing film, one of the very few "hard" science fiction films. I'm also reminded of a bad direct-to-cable movie called The Void.

[RightWingAtheist]

I don't know what that story is, but Larry Niven's "The Hole Man" is somewhat similar.

[-YYZ-]

OK, I understand that. Now what's this about BHs not having an event horizon after all?

[chaosagent]

bump