Should we worry? Microscopic black holes are easier to make than we thought

According to a team of researchers, creating microscopic black holes is actually easier than scientists originally thought.

Particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), smash particles together at incredible speeds (approaching the speed of light), as scientists try unlock the secrets of the universe by breaking matter down into its tiniest components. While these experiments are harmless, they have sparked some fears in the public about the possibility of creating mini black holes, which would quickly expand and consume the Earth in a matter of moments.

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"The one common misconception about the small black holes that may form at the Large Hadron Collider is that they would swallow the Earth," said Frans Pretorius, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University, according to LiveScience. "With about as much confidence as we can say anything in science, this is completely impossible."

Black holes form naturally during the deaths of massive stars. These giant solar furnaces fuse hydrogen into helium at their core, generating incredible energies in the process. When their supply of hydrogen is spent, a process begins where heavier and heavier elements are created in the core as they fuse helium into carbon, then carbon into neon, then neon into oxygen, oxygen into silicon and finally silicon into iron. When the stellar core is nothing but iron, the star cannot fuse iron into anything heavier. With its source of energy cut off, the outward pressure that keeps the star intact ceases and the star collapses under the influence of its own immense gravity. With so much matter collapsing in on itself so quickly (roughly 70,000 km/s), crushing smaller and smaller, the stress becomes too much for even the very fabric of spacetime, and the resulting 'singularity' of crushed matter opens up an astronomical sinkhole from which nothing, not even light, can escape.

It is theoretically possible to create a black hole by particle collisions. Einstein's famous equation, E = mc², shows the relation between energy and mass. Increase the energy of a particle and its mass also increases. Also, by Einstein's theory of relativity, when the particle's mass increases, it warps the fabric of spacetime more, and this can cause a 'gravitational lensing effect' where two colliding particles focus each others' energy, creating a higher combined mass, pushing gravity to its limits and spawning a tiny black hole.

The particle collider that can create these mini black holes hasn't been built yet, though. Even the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest and most powerful collider we have, can't generate the energies needed.

However, a team of researchers, using a supercomputer to run particle collision simulations, has figured out that the energies needed to spawn these microscopic black holes are lower than they previously thought. In fact, "one might expect black hole formation at one-third the energy" says Pretorius.

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So, should we be worried now? When the LHC comes back online, should we start a fresh batch of court proceedings to ban their experiments?

The answer to both of those questions is "no".

The energies needed to create these microscopic black holes, even with these latest findings, are millions of billions of times larger than what we are capable of generating.

However, if we actually managed to pull it off someday, these black holes are so minuscule that they would quickly evaporate due to Hawking radiation before they could develop further. We would see them for an instant, just long enough to register their existence, and then they would be gone. Even if the very worst-case scenario occurred and the tiny black hole managed to consume enough matter to sustain itself, it is projected that it would take more than the current age of the universe for it to consume even one milligram of matter.

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