Posted on 01/19/2006 1:53:38 PM PST by djf
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.
The RHIC is sited at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
"Answer: A black hole becomes dangerous when you can fit into it."
EVERYTHING fits into a Black Hole ... nothing excapes ... even liberal lies get captured.
Wasn't that what Stephen Hawking famously changed his mind about a couple years ago? IIRC, he now acknowledges that information does leak out of a black hole.
>>>Or are the gravitational forces exerted by bending space too great to be useful?
As I understand it (which is not very much), the tidal forces would be too great to withstand, barring some type of Trek-ish "containment field".
Kinda. What happens (according to Hawking's equations) is that the universe is constantly producing paired particles and anti-particles at the quantum level. These particles are almost always instantly drawn to each other like magnets of opposite polarity, and annihilate when they meet.
However, near a black hole, the anti-particle is drawn towards the event horizon (the point at which even light can't escape) while the particle is repelled (the way two positive magnets repell each other). So the anti-particle goes into the black hole and destroys a particle inside, reducing the size of the black hole, while the particle is hurled away, becoming radiation.
So the black hole itself doesn't actually emit radiation--it's still "black" in that respect--but thanks to a strange interaction that goes on just above the even horizon, radiation can be observed apparently coming from it and reducing it in size. This radiation is called Hawking's Radiation for the obvious reason. In a small enough black hole, the anti-particles reduce it to nothing in less than a second, because its gravity isn't strong enough to replace the particles destroyed by the anti-particles from its surroundings fast enough.
A larger black hole would also "radiate away" in this fashion provided that it were isolated from other matter so that its intake of particles was slower than its intake of antiparticles, but this would of course take far, far longer.
As someone else said, if they DID make a micro-black hole, let's hope that Hawking didn't forget to carry the two. :^)
Well, thanks to the game Doom, we now have strategies for dealing with such an occurrence.
Dibs on the BFG.
"and finally Hillary, before it chokes.
I think the nearest black hole that could stuff Hillary's thighs past its singularity is over in Andromeda."
Captain ... that vortex is gonna blow!!! She can't take another one of her fat ankles!!!
Get us out of here now SCOTTY ... Warp 9!!!!
It's OK, it's in a Blue state! ;-)
If its a Bosun, it will have to walk the 'Planck'.
Ba da bim!
science has finally found a way to recreate the democrat party.
The question is, WHY WOULD WE WHAT TO FIND OUT? It has NO practical value except as a "doomsday weapon" in the truest sense of the term.
Keep in mind the safety distance from a blackhole is measured in LIGHT YEARS, and you want to flirt with creating one in our collective backyard.
This research crosses that line between genius and insanity.
Otherwise we'd be better off with atomic hand grenades.
ooops!
The key words you missed were "and distances". A very, very short distance away--much less than the diameter of a proton--the force due to gravity from the object will be dwarfed by the electrostatic force due to its charge.
What's the worst that could happen?
Where's Steven?
Glad you're here, Physicist, we've had an ongoing debate on a serious subject - what size black hole would have an event horizon that could consume Hillary's thighs?
That said, if it is indeed an "instanton" black hole, its mass, I believe, is much smaller than would be expected from the Einstein field equations in four dimensions. A low-mass instanton black hole is a prediction of extra-dimension theories.
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