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.
See!
I knew there would be someone here smart enough to figure it out.
:0)
Cool. I'm going to try it.
Errrrr, that's assuming they're using billion in the north american sense, not the british sense. Whoever wrote that article is innumerate and/or scientifically illiterate. They might just as well have said "an extremely tiny fraction of a second" for all that most would understand it - scientific notation is the only reasonable way to write a number with that many zeros in it.
"This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion, billionths of a second"
Wow! Isn't that about the same amount of time as passed from when "Waterworld" came out in the theater and when it hit the video stores?
Sounds good, lets go with that.
When I was in HS electronics, I built a cattle prod with 2 d-cells, a step-up transformer and a large capacitor. Ain't HS kids inventive?
I read this one too - the name of the book is "Einstein's Bridge". It came out shortly after the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) project was scrapped by Congress back in the mid '90s. I can't remember the author's name.
You don't wanna mess around with this kind of stuff, that's for sure...
Kind of like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it ... blah blah blah..
or the proverbial I have my truth and you have yours..
If that was true, then, that makes those truths an opinion.. as liberals think all truth is..
Question: What happens when you sequister some liberals in a cylotron and expect them to come up with a logical thought.?.
Answer: Humans love a good story, liberals know that.. and will provide one..
Man, I hope you ended that with a tacit "/sarcasm". I remember reading that one of the biggest worries connected to the Manhattan Project was that they would ignite the whole of the earth's atmosphere. "There goes the atmosphere, oh bother!".
Is the cup half full or half empty?
Outlaw Black-Holes Now!
Not near enough, so I had to find ... um, other means of testing.
Depends on whether its at the level it was filled to <- half or some extent full.. or whether that level has been reduced <-half or some extent emptied..
Another way they could have written would have been as "10 millionths of a billionth of a billionth of a second", which is still damn awkward but at least reads correctly and I assume is what they meant.
That's what I was afraid of. :)
Check out the sample chapters at www.baen.com
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