The world's largest, most powerful particle smasher probably won't generate any planet-gobbling black holes, according

to a new analysis. That's contrary to suggestions in a news article Wednesday that invoked a possib le doomsday scenario and said black holes created by the collider could stick ar ound longer than predicted. The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile (27-kilometer) circular tunnel running 300 feet (91 meters) underground at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, is expected to recreate the conditions that occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the theoretical instant in which the universe was b orn from an incredibly small point. By smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light, the LHC could help to solve mysteries about the origin of mass and the reasons for more matter than a ntimatter in the universe. (The LHC was shut down last year after a helium leak was discovered within days of its initial powering up. The machine is scheduled to restart again sometime t his year, according to CERN.) Scientists have speculated the proton-to-proton collisions could possibly genera te microscopic black holes. These black holes would be orders of magnitude small er and less massive than the gravity wells produced by the collapse of stars and known to exist in the universe, said Howard Gordon of Brookhaven National Labor atory in New York, who also works at the LHC. Even still, fears arose in the past few years that the LHC could churn out a bla ck hole that would gobble up everything in sight, including our planet. Advertise AdChoices

Why the fears? "I think it's the confusion between the massive black holes in th e universe and these microscopic black holes that possibly could get created," G ordon told LiveScience. "It's a difference in scale." Black-hole model The new analysis, detailed online at ArXiv.org, a repository for new research pa pers, suggests again that the LHC probably can't generate a catastrophic black h ole. Gordon said the analysis is based on a theoretical model and that further resear ch is needed to confirm the results. Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and his University of Alab ama colleagues Benjamin Harms and Sergio Fabi based their theoretical model on t he so-called Randall-Sundrum brane-world scenario, in which the four-dimensional universe is embedded within a five-dimensional space. "All we're doing is taking a model of our space-time, where we live, and explori ng the consequences," Harms said during a telephone interview. "And our explorat ion shows that black holes could not grow large enough to become catastrophic in the sense that they could do damage to the Earth or anything in the Earth." He added, "What we found was that if black holes are created at the LHC, they wo uld not be able to grow to catastrophic size because the accretion rate is simpl y not great enough to offset the evaporation rate." In fact, the model showed that once a black hole is created by the LHC (if that were to happen), the only way to get the black hole to grow would be "to extend the size of one of the parameters in our model beyond a physically accepted valu e," so beyond what is physically possible. And then, such a black hole would evaporate, and essentially vanish, within onetrillionth to one-millionth of a second, the model showed. While the black holes might not truly vanish, their masses would become so small they would have no e ffect on Earth. One small caveat is that the results only apply to Earth because they depend par tly on the density of material through which the black holes are traveling. Creating black holes "Large Hadron Collider had a tremendous amount of publicity last year because of the black hole speculations," Gordon said, adding, "We don't know for sure we'r

e even going to see black holes in the Large Hadron Collider." Here's the logic behind the LHC generating microscopic black holes: Various models of the universe suggest extra dimensions (other than those of spa ce and time) exist and are folded up into sizes ranging from that of a proton to as big as a fraction of a millimeter. The models go on to suggest that at dista nces comparable to such sizes, gravity becomes far stronger. If this is true, th e collider could smash enough energy together to generate gravitational collapse s that produce black holes. Advertise AdChoices

Researchers have calculated that under such scenarios, the accelerator could cre ate a microscopic black hole anywhere from every second to every day. Harmless black holes Physicists have repeatedly said that fears about these artificial black holes ar e "groundless." For instance, microscopic black holes would probably lose more mass than they ab sorb and so would evaporate immediately. Say a black hole was created and that black hole was stable. "Then their interac tions would be very weak. They would pass harmlessly into space. They would vani sh," Gordon said, referring to stable black holes with no electrical charge. In addition, as CERN scientists have pointed out, Earth is bathed with cosmic ra ys powerful enough to create black holes, and the planet hasn't been destroyed y et. At the end of the day, Gordon said, the LHC is safe and so are we. "We're expecting the discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider to be significant and exciting, but we are pretty sure that the collider is safe and will not be c ausing any trouble to people living on Earth," Gordon said