Making a Micro-Black Hole

Did you hear the one about the particle accelerator that created a micro-black hole? You know, the one where this black hole exponentially grows into an Earth-eating behemoth, destroying all life as we know it?

You probably did hear that little piece of comedy in the build-up to the grand start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in September 2008, and at first, you might have thought there was some real physics behind this manmade doomsday theory.

Alas, the physics was flawed and the Hawaiian guy at the center of it all saw CONSPIRACY! hiding behind every super-cooled electromagnet.

The Earth (in fact, all celestial bodies) is bombarded with particles (cosmic rays) of far higher energies than the ones collided in the LHC. We're still here. What's more, I haven't seen any black holes float around my neighborhood recently.

The Black Hole Hunt

We know the Earth-munching, LHC-generated black hole theory has more flaws in it than Europa's crust, but scientists do think the next-generation particle accelerator could generate tiny black holes.

This is actually rather exciting. If micro-black holes are generated after the high-energy collisions inside the LHC, they could provide the first experimental evidence of Hawking Radiation, the only radiation predicted to be emitted from a black hole's event horizon. If the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking is discovered (via the detection of evaporating black holes), a Nobel Prize for Physics wouldn't be far away.

Hold on, isn't there a mixed message here? On the one hand, we have conspiracy nuts scaring the world (yet thrilling the tabloid press), saying that "reckless" physicists could destroy the world with a black hole, and then we have physicists confirming that they would love to see black holes generated in the LHC. What's going on?

It's a little thing called mass, and the micro-black holes that are theorized to be produced by the LHC simply do not have enough of it to cause any damage.

More Mass = More Suck

Cosmic black holes are created after the collapse of a massive star. They are, by definition, massive. If something is massive, it has a strong gravitational field. Any planets, stars or space cows that stray too close will be sucked in, making the black hole more massive.

Micro-black holes are miniscule. They have next to no mass, exert a near-zero gravitational pull on matter, and therefore do not grow. In fact, they most likely do the opposite; they evaporate. Fast.

Even if they had the opportunity to grow, they would accrete matter so slowly that they still wouldn't attain any measurable growth for billions and billions of years.

In a recent publication, a group of physicists decided to crunch the numbers on the likelihood of the LHC generating these vanishingly small micro-black holes, and they pretty much drew the same conclusions as CERN physicists have been saying for the last year. Any black hole generated at the LHC would pose zero threat to Earth.

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