Wednesday, 02 Apr 2008, 01:53

Scientists working at NASA have spotted the smallest black hole ever discovered. Its mass is less that four times the mass of the Sun and has the size of a large city. Scientists dubbed the little black hole J1650. Despite its small size and mass, the hole is still very strong.

"This black hole is really pushing the limits. For many years astronomers have wanted to know the smallest possible size of a black hole, and this little guy is a big step toward answering that question," stated Nikolai Shaposhnikov, who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Scientists consider that the small black hole can be even stronger than bigger holes located in the middle of our galaxies. Shaposhnikov mentioned that the gravity of the hole is able to "stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti."

Just like all the other black holes in the universe J1650 was created by a star that has shut down due to the fact that it ran out of fuel and it disintegrated because of its own gravity. Together with his colleague Lev Titarchuk, Nikolai Shaposhnikov in his research used Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite and applied a new way to calculate the size of the black hole, which was discovered in a system located in the southern constellation Ara, found in our Milky Way Galaxy.

The new method of black hole size estimation calculates the oscillation of hot gas that amassed near the black hole as it absorbs matter. The method applied by the researchers was mentioned at the meeting of American Astronomical Society High-Energy Astrophysics Division held in Los Angeles.

According to scientists the mass of J1650 is of 3.8 Suns and it would be about 15 mile across. "This makes the black hole one of the smallest objects ever discovered outside our solar system," concluded Shaposhnikov.

"Amazingly, equations from Albert Einstein predict that a black hole with 3.8 times the mass of our Sun would be only 15 miles across - the size of a city," stated NASA's representatives.

According to scientists a star that would collapse having a much smaller parameters than J1650, would probably form a neutron star rather than a black hole.


SOURCE

Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave (CERN, Switzerland),

Physicist working to whip up black holes on demand
Landsberg and others expect some breakthroughs when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European physics center near Geneva, Switzerland, goes online.

By Cynthia Ferguson

About once a century the world of physics has experienced a kind of revolution. In intervals of about 100 years, Kepler, Newton, Oersted and Faraday, and then Einstein shook up established beliefs and theories. Now, says Assistant Professor Greg Landsberg, physicists may be on the verge of the biggest breakthrough yet.

While physicists today can explain and measure nearly everything, there is one mystery that continues to stump them — how quantum mechanics and general relativity fit together. The success of the Standard Model of particle physics led scientists to believe that all known forces, including gravity, should unify at very high energy. What puzzles them is that gravity is considerably weaker than the three other forces.

Three years ago, several scientists proposed a radical solution. They suggested that gravity is indeed as strong as other forces, but that it is hidden inside extra dimensions and, therefore, diluted from our point of view.

Proving or disproving that theory may well be just five or six years away, according to Landsberg (left). With the completion of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European physics center near Geneva, Switzerland, Landsberg and others may finally have the smoking gun that has eluded them for years.

Since 1999, Landsberg has been searching for evidence of extra dimensions by smashing protons and antiprotons together in what is now the world’s largest particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. He is working with two Brown colleagues — physics professors David Cutts and Richard Partridge — and a group of graduate and postgraduate students on an experiment called D0 (pronounced D-Zero). This 12-member team is investigating physics beyond the Standard Model and conducting precision tests of that widely held theory. D0 is one of two major experiments at Fermilab’s particle accelerator.

But that accelerator is just shy of having the power necessary to produce what Landsberg believes will hold critical keys to the unexplained universe — miniature black holes with a mass several thousands times that of a proton. If the theory of extra dimensions is correct, the crushing speed and energy of the Large Hadron Collider, expected to go online in 2006, will produce tiny black holes at a rate as high as one a second, giving scientists their first look at these mysterious entities. They’ll have to look fast though; if current theories hold up — Hawking radiation in particular — black holes this small will live and die in a split second.

Few physicists and astronomers question the existence of black holes, but no one yet has provided irrefutable proof. A black hole is thought to be a massive star — far denser and more massive than our sun — that has burned out and collapsed under its own weight. It takes a vast amount of matter to produce gravity strong enough to crush itself. If something the size of the earth were to become a black hole, its ultimate size would be comparable to that of a pingpong ball.

A black hole is surrounded with what is known as an "event horizon." Within that boundary, virtually nothing — not even light — can escape. If you were to fall into a black hole, the gravitational pull would be so great you would reach its core within seconds. Because light can’t escape, we are unable to see a black hole, but scientists do think they’ve seen surrounding matter falling into what they believe is one.

There may be yet another visible trace of their existence. Stephen Hawking suggested in the 1970s that black holes give as well as take, that the intense gravitational field of a black hole can make part of a particle-antiparticle pair pop out near its event horizon, causing the black hole to lose energy and eventually evaporate. For a massive black hole, that would take far longer than the current age of the universe. For the mini black holes manufactured at CERN, it would take just a tiny fraction of a second.

Theorizing that black holes decay into a wide array of particles, Landsberg believes the manufactured black holes will "light up a detector like a Christmas tree." This, he says, will provide scientists with their long-sought smoking gun. And properties of Hawking radiation may tell physicists something about the shape of extra-spatial dimensions. By measuring the energy needed to make black holes and the energy of Hawking radiation, scientists will be able to determine how many extra dimensions there are and how tightly they are folded up, according to Landsberg.

With laboratory-produced black holes, physicists will be able to test not only the theories of gravity and extra dimensions, but also the "information paradox." Although scientists have long held that information can never disappear, some wonder whether information dropped into a black hole would in fact be erased when the hole eventually disintegrates. Others, however, believe that the information is still there and is imprinted on the Hawking radiation released from the hole.

If the LHC produces black holes, this question can be resolved once and for all. Scientists could use the accelerator to cook up black holes with different ingredients but the same mass. If the radiation they emit is the same, then black holes really do destroy information.

For those worried that the mini black holes produced at CERN may destroy people as well — gobbling up everything in sight and ultimately devouring all of Europe — Landsberg insists this is not a legitimate concern. The size of these black holes is too small, and their life span too short, to pose any threat, he says. In fact, notes Landsberg, similar black holes are created organically every day when cosmic rays smash into the earth’s atmosphere at even higher energies than those found in particle accelerators.

Landsberg is clearly excited by what seems to lie ahead. "What people are doing in particle physics now has much to do with what astrophysicists are doing in the galaxy," he says. "Everyone senses that something new and completely unexpected is going to pop up any time, and that we’re right around the corner from a discovery that may overwhelm what happened in physics at the beginning of the last century."

Source: http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol26/26GSJ10a.html

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Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave

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This will come as a real blow to Mya Mason, who is widely regarded as the "Smallest Black Ho"

Uh, this thing isn't going to be producing any black holes - it's much too weak. It's less energy in each impact than catching a tossed - not pitched - baseball. If it does make one somehow it will release that much energy and no more, less powerful than the release from an anal queen's black hole on a porn set.

In any case, I thought Hawking's theory that black holes eroded/disappeared was disproven in the 90s by some guy [Suskind?] from Stanford or Cal Tech.


For me, it's hard to swallow that mass/energy is lost. Mass should either be conserved or converted to energy ... and if so the energy should be conserved or converted to mass.

Maybe this "radiation" is that energy ...

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If it does make one somehow it will release that much energy and no more, less powerful than the release from an anal queen's black hole on a porn set.

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So, Christmas is saved?