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.
Did you ever read "The Day the Earth Froze"?....Scientists made a bomb from anti-matter and it threw us into an ice age.
The line was "ten million billion billionths". The billion and billionths cancel each other leaving 10 million seconds. 10 million seconds divided by 86400 seconds per day yields 115.74 days.
"some missing socks..."
Find those gluons and you'll find your socks!
bttt
Read the line the way it was written. A billion billionths= 1. Ten million times 1 second is how many days. There are 86400 seconds in one day.
Some people do not read the words that are printed on the page but rather what they think the writer must have meant.
Thats just the kind of answer I expected from a moron like yourself.
Best of luck.
if you read the corresponding article and thread on http://www.fark.com, one of the actual participants in the study/project comments on the results of the study and the physics involved. very interesting stuff. the Users name on Fark is "BillCosby." I learned a lot. I think I did anyway. I went into communications when I realized it involved very little math.
Well now there's a goddamn black hole where I used to drink beer.
My graduate studies were in nuclear physics, and I spent several summers back during the 80's at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Back then, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) didn't exist yet. All there was at the site were some enormous empty tunnels, dug for a different accelerator project that never got off the ground. The tunnels stood as a monument to fiscal and bureaucratic incompetence and government boondoggles... but they looked really cool and spooky at night.
In short, it was the big make-out spot in those days. Or a place for drinking beer, if you were a physics geek with no girlfriend. I have many fond memories of hanging out by those huge empty holes on a summer night with my friends, watching the deer watching us, curiously from the tree line, and getting quietly drunk.
If you "read the lines" you will see this was a fast reaction, not one for 115 days!
There is actually a book about this...can't remember the name. The CERN scientists created a tiny opening into another universe.
Cosm, by Gregory Benford I think, wrote about the creation of an entire universe at RHIC.
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/disaster.htm
Says right here it's safe.
"On the Borderland of Sol" by Larry Niven. You charge the hole using an ion rocket then use magnets and static E fields to move it about.
Then you use it to pirate nullspace ships, since of course a null drive cannot operate near a singularity.
You are reading what you think you should sê, not what was written.
OK, right, I remember reading about that. But Hawking still doesn't believe any "information" can escape the black hole, right? Just one part of virtual particle pairs, ie Hawking radiation? Any normal energy/matter from outside the EH passing beyond the event horizon is still doomed, right? But once, and if, the whole universe ends up collapsing back into one big black whole (ie the big crunch), eventually given enough time, like many times the previous lifespan of the universe, assuming time has any further meaning at that point, it will eventually evaporate through Hawking radiation.
Pretty far-out stuff, maybe a little too far out for my limited mind to fully grasp.
It is purgatory applied to matter rather than souls ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.