In the popular imagination, a black hole is a ravenous monster that swallows everything in its vicinity. So worry that a physicist could accidentally or intentionally create it inside a particle accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at his CERN near Geneva. there is. Would such a dark behemoth swallow the earth itself? it’s not. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet. But even if someone did, it wouldn’t pose much of a threat.
Black holes in the real world are only scary in the sense that if you get too close, you can’t escape. But even if someone created a black hole in a laboratory on Earth, the limits of human technology wouldn’t allow them to create anything particularly dangerous. Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton University, said, “The mass is so small that the effect of gravity is likely to be relatively small.” “It doesn’t really gobble up that much stuff.”
In fact, the possibility of creating black holes in the laboratory is a goal actively pursued by scientists, and the possibility that researchers will be able to answer many fundamental questions about quantum mechanics and the nature of gravity. There is a nature.
Black holes usually form when stars much larger than the Sun die. While the outer layers of such a star explode outward in a spectacular supernova, its core is crumpled inward and pushed down toward its central point with such force that the known forces of the universe cannot stop it. This creates a subatomic spot of unimaginable mass and density, whose gravitational force is so strong that even those moving at the speed of light cannot move fast enough to escape its clutches. This kind of black hole is common throughout the universe.
Unless, of course, something gets too close to the black hole, you’re safe. Only within the spherical boundaries surrounding the black hole, known as the event horizon, can people and objects be pulled inexorably inward. Massive black holes have large event horizons millions of kilometers in diameter, while small black holes have much smaller event horizons tens of kilometers in diameter. If you could create a black hole weighing just 0.5 kilograms in the lab, its event horizon would be one trillionth of a proton.
The concern that the LHC will produce black holes is based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity, where the mass (meters) and energy (picture) are compatible, so the famous equation E = mc2where “c” is the speed of light. Supercolliders collide protons at incredible speeds (close to the speed of light) and energies, so all sorts of weird and bizarre particles are thrown out, possibly including black holes. But creating a black hole with a microscopic event horizon would require billions of times more energy than the LHC can produce. And even if such a black hole could be created, the object would quickly lose energy and disappear in the blink of an eye.
Before the facility became operational in 2008, several researchers believed that the structure of spacetime was superfluous, as postulated in superstring theory, a possible way to combine quantum physics and gravity into one theory. I assumed that a black hole could appear if it had . This is because in our four-dimensional universe (three dimensions of space and one dimension of time), gravity is too weak to force matter into a black hole. However, if other dimensions exist, gravity may not be the underdog it seems to us. Because some of its power may be leaking into these other strange dimensions. In such a universe, black holes would be much more likely to appear inside Atom Smashers, and could reveal insights into the nature of gravity. The discovery would have been “one of the strangest and most amazing physics he could see at the LHC,” says theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
The idea was picked up by the media and received a great response. A German chemist even filed a lawsuit against his CERN in the European Court of Human Rights. A task force of physicists began investigating the issue already in 2003, and found that particles from space hit the atmosphere with energies far greater than those on supercolliders, thus creating black holes. I concluded that it was highly unlikely. The Commission’s report was reviewed and reissued in 2008 with additional information to alleviate public concerns.
So far, no black holes have been confirmed at the LHC. “It would be nice,” says Maldacena, to confirm the predictions of string theory.
Recently, a team announced that it had used quantum computers to create a simulation of a baby wormhole, a kind of bridge through reality created from two black holes. Although the results were widely covered in the press, they were not the breakthrough many had imagined.
“What we have created is like a strange quantum mechanical property of matter with mathematical properties associated with wormholes,” Quataert said. “It’s more of a conceptual connection than a literal connection.”
Nevertheless, the work is promising, and in the future more powerful quantum computers will use Albert Einstein’s equations to generate objects that simulate black holes, and physicists will study their behavior in detail. Maldacena said it could be possible.
If he has real black holes in his lab, Quataert would like to learn more about the bright light beacons called accretion disks that these objects produce when they shred nearby matter. . “I create a small accretion disk by throwing matter into a black hole and watch the gas swirls and produce a lot of light,” he says. “It would be great if we could understand how these accretion discs actually work in a controlled setting.”
