Black Holes Factory?
In 2006 it was predicted that the world's most powerful particle accelerator, a.k.a. "Large Hadron Collider", would enable to create black holes. The Large Hadron Collider is in an underground circular tunnel nearly 17 miles long at the world's largest physics laboratory, the "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire" (CERN), near Geneva. At its maximum, each particle beam the collider fires will pack as much energy as a 400-ton train traveling at 120 mph. By smashing particles together and investigating the debris, scientists hope to help solve mysteries such as the origin of mass and why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
What is a black hole?
The basic idea of a black hole is simply an object whose gravity is so strong that light cannot escape from it. It is black because it does not reflect light, nor does its surface emit any light. For better understanding let's imagine the following example using Newton's law of physics.
The basic idea of a black hole is simply an object whose gravity is so strong that light cannot escape from it. It is black because it does not reflect light, nor does its surface emit any light. The basic ideas based on Newtons law had to be extenended when Albert Einstein completed his theory of general relativity, in order to include situations in which time and space could be greatly distorted.
The German mathematician Karl Schwarzschild investigated what would happen if all the matter in a body were concentrated at a mathematical point, and distinguished two black hole regions separated by a geometric feature called an “event horizon”. The world outside the event horizon is where we live and contains our universe, but inside the event horizon, space and time behave in very different ways entirely. Once inside, matter and light cannot get back out into the rest of the universe.
Figure 1. Artist's impression of a dust torus around a super-massive black hole.
Missconception: Is black hole a vacuum cleaner?
Most people think of a black hole as a voracious vacuum cleaner in space, sucking down everything around it. But that's not really true. Black holes can only suck matter under certain conditions.
- If a body orbits close to the event horizon in an elliptical orbit, it emits gravitational radiation, and its orbit will eventually decay in millions of years.
- A disk of gas can form around a black hole, and through friction, matter will slowly slide into the black hole over time
How to create black holes?
The most common way for a black hole to form is probably in a supernova, an exploding star. When a star with about 25 times the mass of the Sun ends its life, it explodes. The outer part of the star screams outward at high speed, but the inner part of the star, its core, collapses down. If there is enough mass, the gravity of the collapsing core will compress it so much that it can become a black hole. When it’s all over, the black hole will have a few times the mass of the Sun. This is called a “stellar-mass black hole”, what many astronomers think of as a “regular” black hole.
Black holes also form when two orbiting neutron stars merge to produce a short gammaray burst, a tremendous blast of energy detectable across the entire observable Universe.
Using supercomputers researchers were able to simulate collisions among particles zipping near the speed of light. Such simulations have shown that black holes could form at lower energies than previously thought.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity mass and energy are related. The greater the energy of a particle, i.e., the faster a particle gets accelerated in a collider, the greater its mass becomes. Next, Einstein's theory explains that mass curves the fabric of space and time, generating the phenomenon known as gravity. As particles zip along within particle colliders, they warp space-time and can focus energy much as glass lenses focus light. When two particles accelerated are at each other, they distort to pancake shapes and then form a black hole, as shown in video 1.
Video 1. Two particles accelerated at each other distort to pancake shapes and then form a black hole
Source: www.livescience.com/
The following video summarizes a first introduction about black holes.
Video 2. Black Holes:Warping Time & Space.
Source: www.space.com
Additional Reading:
Space Math: Black Holes
Black Holes
Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth
Mini Black Holes Easier To Make Than Thought
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