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Question: Hey guys, I've got a burning question I want answered: Let's say we have a nuclear fusion power

plant. If it goes critical, will a black hole be created that could potentially devour the entire planet? Asked By: Nguyen Lng Minh Answer: To start, nuclear ssion is a radically different process to nuclear fusion. Fission, like the nuclear power plants on Earth, is the process of deriving energy from splitting atoms apart, while nuclear fusion is the process of taking light elements (like hydrogen and helium) and fusing them into heavier elements. At the current time, the latter has not proven to be scally viable, but our sun is a natural nuclear reactor. When an atom is split into constituent parts, radiation is released -- something that is incredibly dangerous to humans in large quantities, as it can warp our DNA, damage biological cells (causing cancer) and can cause infertility through sterilization. Though these just concern the human body itself, without including the implications it can have environmentally. Two of the most famous nuclear disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima, took place not too long ago. Both happened after the reactors got too hot, ultimately causing the containers to melt. To offset the chances of another similar incident occurring, the plants have a huge cache of water on hand, to keep the containers cool. So as you can see, both are relatively safe as far as the laws of physics are concerned. Humans, on the other hand, are the architects of their own destruction. The Creation of a Black Hole: Generally, a star must have nearly three times more mass than our sun to collapse into a stellar-mass black hole. After the star consumes the entirety of fuel forged in its core for nuclear fusion (something that counteracts the force of gravity keeping the star from collapsing in on itself), gravity will eventually win over, causing the core to collapse into a

point-like singularity. In other cases, neutron degeneracy will halt this process, cramming the remaining mass of the star into a dense object only a few kilometers across, called a neutron star. However, stellar-mass black holes are not the only type of black hole. We also have super-massive black holes that can contain the mass of a billion suns (these are thought to thrive in the galactic center of most galaxies, even our own), as well as the newly discovered 'ultra-massive' black holes and micro-black holes. The Creation of Micro-Black Holes: There is quite a big debate amongst physicists concerning the minimum mass of a black hole and how much energy one would need to be able to create one, but many believe that miniature black holes could theoretically occur through particle acceleration collisions (like those done at CERN's Large Hadron Collider). One would need an insane amount of energy to do so, though, with original estimates coming in at about quadrillion (or a million-billion) times more energy than the LHC is capable of generating. If it was actually possible to create a mini-black hole through this process, it wouldn't eat Earth from the inside out. Instead, it's quite likely that the black hole would evaporate in only a fraction of a second (Hawking Radiation). Even if it were stable enough to remain, it would take billions (maybe even trillions) of years for the black hole to consume even a single atom of matter. Sadly, black holes aren't the cosmic vacuum cleaners most people believe them to be, nor do they exert any more gravitational inuence than other celestial objects with the same mass. So in short: No. Nuclear ssion cannot generate black holes. Nor could nuclear fusion reactors (if they ever become feasible). However, micro-black holes ARE possible (in theory), but if one did form, it wouldn't be able to do any damage to Earth. - Jaime For Further Reading: "Man-Made (But Very Tiny) Black Holes Possible:" http://news.discovery.com/space/the-lhc-black-hole-no-braner.htm "Fusion Power Could Happen Sooner Than You Think:" http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/fusion-power-could-happensooner-you-think "The Creation of Black Holes:" http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_blackholes_blackholes.html Image Source: http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/blogs/ 6a00d8341bf67c53ef012875878282970c-800wi.jpg Image Credit: NASA/CERN/Ian ONeill

Man-Made (But Very Tiny) Black Holes Possible


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. Were still here. Whats more, I havent 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 Europas crust, but scientists do think the nextgeneration 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 holes event horizon. If the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking is discovered (via the detection of evaporating black holes), a Nobel Prize for Physics wouldnt be far away. Hold on, isnt 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. Whats going on? Its 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 wouldnt 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.

Brane Leak

The leading theory about how micro-black holes might form in our Universe is made possible by the existence of extra-dimensions. The theory is that more dimensions exist than the four we experience (i.e. three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that constitute space-time as described by Einsteins theory of General Relativity). The four dimensional Universe we live in can be considered to be a brane, where other branes exist alongside ours, exerting a force. This description of out multidimensional Universe is very useful as it helps to explain why the force of gravity is many orders of magnitude weaker than the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces gravity is leaking into our 4D universe from the neighboring branes.

All this talk of branes and extra-dimensions may sound complex, but their existence allows the production of micro-black holes should the collisions inside the LHC be energetic enough. Therefore, if microblack holes are detected in the LHC, we have experimental evidence for some of the most complex theories mankind has ever devised. In short, these are very exciting times.

The Fast Die Young, The Slow Dont Grow

So, what did the researchers from Italy, US and Germany find out? First, we found that tidal black holes would evaporate (almost) instantly, says Roberto Casadio from the University of Bologna, Italy, and his three colleagues in their publication titled Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC. This is all well and good, but what if a micro-black hole shoots through the Earth at high speed? show that the black holes with a large value of the initial momentum would cross the Earth in a matter of seconds and come out with velocities much larger than the Earths escape velocity, say Casadio et al. Once these speeding black holes pop out the other side of the Earth, they stop accreting mass (from the Earths interior) and are flung into space and evaporate as they radiate Hawking Radiation. But dont worry about these welterweights punching a hole in the ground beneath you, on the entire trip through our planet, a single black hole will have swept up a meager 10-22 kg of rock. 10-22 kg is the mass of a hemoglobin molecule inside a red blood cell. But say if the black hole isnt very speedy and it drops like a stone into the Earth and stays there? The researchers point out that the slower the black hole, the less mass it accretes; so although it might pop out of the LHC and sink into our planet, it will suck up very little mass.

If a slow-moving micro-black hole set up home inside Earth and sat there for 13.7 billion years (the age of the Universe), it would weigh in at a puny 10-18 kg (the mass of a virus).

Our overall conclusion is therefore that the tidal charged black holes are a viable model of micro-black holes which might be produced at the LHC. The model predicts that such black holes cannot grow to catastrophic size, but might live long enough to escape the detectors and result in signicant amounts of missing energy. Casadio et al., 2009
When the LHC gets fired up in the coming weeks, lets see if any energy goes missing after a particle collision, it might be a sign of black hole birth (but not of the Earth-munching variety). Source: Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC, Casadio et al., 2009. arXiv:0911.1884v1 [hep-th] Image: NASA/CERN/Ian ONeill

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