Post by Empress Palpatine on Aug 25, 2009 23:15:48 GMT -5
There was a thread over at UJ (a board soon to close) about black holes. It was called "The End of the World." Observer put up a link saying how the world could end because of what scientists are doing:
www.cracked.com/article_16583_5-scientific-experiments-most-likely-end-world.html
I replied to it thus:
"The fears concerning the particle collider have been way overblown. Some think that mini black holes will form and gobble up the earth.
They turned it on this fall, but there was an electrical problem of some kind. It will take months to fix it. It is supposed to be up and running this spring.
Personally, I look forward to what new secrets they may uncover.
More info:
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26439957/
Observer came back and asked:
"Welcome back Azoth!
What would happen if scientists could create a dime sized black hole?
What would contain it?
Would it sink to the center of the Earth?"
I replied:
"This is CERN's answer to the fear of black holes being made by the accelerator:
public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html
They were only anticipating microscopic black holes. Yours is a "what if" question. I will bring it up at a science site and see what they say."
I returned with more info:
"Here is what I got on that dime sized black hole thing:
Carl Sagan described how much a piece of neutron star would weigh and what it would do:
(three quarters into the clip):
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHHZO2wmmg
A black hole is denser than neutron star but it may be similar in what it would do. This other clip describes a possible scenario of a mini-black hole passing through the earth (About halfway through this film clip). Carl Sagan mentions a mini black hole cutting through the earth (one possible explanation of the Tunguska Event until they ultimately figured out it was a piece of comet).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEsWft0HLCM
Normally, a mini-black hole would never happen because it takes a star larger than our sun to have enough mass for it to happen, that is, for a collapse to occur where it sucks in from its own sheer gravity. One person, on a site where I asked this, said that there may be mini black holes left over from the big bang.
I don't think they can "make one" because they'd need a hundred moons worth of material (mass) to make it. Imagine something the size of a hundred moons. Imagine it pulling on you.
If any more info turns up, I will add it."
Observer said:
"This Carl Sagan series is very interesting. Thank You!"
I found more info:
I got a very precise reply on a science site from a person who has a science background, rpenner. He said:
"On a Dime-sized black hole:
A US Dime has a radius of 0.008955 m. Our best notions (GR, Hawking) of black holes have been tested to distances smaller than 0.0001 m so we need not concern ourselves with any other theory of gravity. According to GR, it would take a mass of 6.031×10^24 kg to have a radius of a dime. That's about 1% more than the mass of the Earth. So obviously, it would suck more than the Earth if it was closer than 1 Earth radius, or 6300 km (4000 miles). Inside the Earth's atmosphere it would dominate local atmospheric effects with a very hot accretion disk throwing out X-rays and killing everything for miles around. Unless it was moving very fast indeed, it would destroy the Earth itself in a matter of hours based on Bondi accretion.
But to create such a black hole, we would need more than the mass of the Earth to play with, so that's not going to happen.
A black hole of the mass of a dime (0.002268 kg) would have a radius of 3.368×10^-30 m, far smaller than any distance probed by the most impressive collider (by a safety margin of well over a billion). It would violently explode with an energy of 48.72 kilotons of TNT over a period of less than 10^-24 seconds, which is less than than the typical time of a strong interaction decay.
But our best colliders can't focus that narrowly, so that's not going to happen."
I just got two very good links about the Large Hadron Collider explaining in English what it will do:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE1jOX3S6zE
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