Are Microscopic Black Holes Buzzing Inside the Earth?
Written by Fraser Cain
There's a book by Larry Niven called "Hole Man", where a group of explorers on Mars come across an alien communications device. One of the scientists thinks there's a microscopic black hole inside, which powers the device, and to prove it, he turns off the containment field. The black hole falls into Mars, consuming the planet from within, and threatening the entire solar system.
Just science fiction? Maybe not. According to B.E. Zhilyaev, a researcher at the Main Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine, in the research paper Singular Sources of Energy in Stars and Planets, the Universe could be buzzing with these microscopic black holes. They might even be inside stars and planets.
This isn't a new concept. Physicists have been theorizing about the possibility of microscopic, primordial black holes for years, and used them to explain everything from dark matter to gamma ray bursts.
It takes a star several times the mass of our Sun to form a black hole naturally when it dies, so there probably isn't a process that can make them any more. But during the first few moments after the Big Bang, the entire Universe was compressed into a microscopic singularity. These primordial black holes could have been generated right at the beginning, and have been with us ever since.
It's also theorized that the new Large Hadron Collider might be capable of creating microscopic black holes through the collision of particles at relativistic velocities.
Before you can wrap your head around this research, consider how big a black hole has to be. For a stellar mass black hole, the event horizon – the point at which nothing can escape – is only a few kilometres from its centre. A black hole with the mass of the Earth? It would be less than 2 cm across. A black hole with the mass of a mountain? Smaller than a hydrogen atom.
Even though a microscopic black hole might contain the mass of a mountain, it would experience almost no friction as it passed through regular matter. It would fall through regular material as if it wasn't there.
In most encounters with stars, these black holes would pass right through. But in a three-body interaction, between a star and a planet for example, the black hole could be trapped inside the star. The black hole would then orbit inside the star for billions of years until it comes to rest at the centre. They could form with the stars and planets from a protostellar cloud of gas and dust, or be captured and incorporated later.
So how do you know if you've got a black hole in your star? As the black hole grows over time, it starts to change the amount of heat generated by the star. A large enough black hole could cause the star to expand in size, and even undergo a supernova prematurely. According to Zhilyaev the interactions between stars and microscopic black holes could be detectable through bursts of gamma rays.
And if a black hole gets inside your planet? You get additional heat. This might account for unusual temperatures seen on Saturn and Jupiter, which are hotter than they should be from solar heating alone. A black hole inside the Earth might actually raise temperatures on the surface enough to sustain animal life long after the Sun dies out.
A power source that would last for eons, providing the most efficient possible conversion of matter to energy. Just don't think about the monster consuming the ground beneath your feet as it keeps you warm.
Filed under: Black Holes
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January 19th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
thats new to me.. so, may the bermuda triangle be a microscopic black hole?
January 21st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Wow. That's a frightful thought.
"consuming the ground beneath your feet"
January 22nd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
After the sun dies out all of the plants will die and most of the animals would die because there would be no plants
February 12th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
can a man generated a black hole.
plz give me reply on sanketgupta07@gmail.com
sanket1407@rediffmail.com
February 17th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
[...] falling into stars or planets have been thought of before. As previously reviewed in the Universe Today, some observations of the planets and stars could be attributed to small [...]
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:53 pm
[...] (PBHs) are getting mischievous again. These artefacts from the Big Bang could be responsible for hiding inside planets or stars, they may even punch a neat, radioactive hole through the Earth. Now, they might start playing [...]
February 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Don't forget Riofrio's black holes hiding in the centers of the planets and moons of the solar system. To get around the Hawking radiation problem either the BH must be large or light must slow with time.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:01 am
look guys I'm not into Astro physics but I just want to know if it's possible for a black hole or a worm hole be behind the mystery of the bermuda tiangle
March 15th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
dude narly space stuffff…send some more stufff about mars…i never new there was a book called hole man…thanks for the advice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 8th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[...] Originally Posted by dhjana Maybe she meant anti-matter. But I don't think that a black hole would devour anything slowly. If it started big enough that it wouldn't just disappear immediately, then the more it pulls in the stronger it gets and I don't know what is the proportion of mass and gravity for black holes, i still bet it would be significantly bigger then earth's in a short while. And even if it did just sink into earth and eat it slowly it would still mess up earth because the first think it eats then would be iron and, poof, there goes the magnetic field. There's a limit to how fast black holes can devour material, which is relative to their mass. Any black hole that this Large Hadron Collider could make would be smaller than an atom, so it wouldn't be able to devour material fast at all. There's an interesting article about this that I read a while ago. Here's the link: Are Microscopic Black Holes Buzzing Inside the Earth? | Universe Today [...]
September 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am
[...] Sterrenkundigen weten al een tijdje dat je zwarte gaten in vele maten hebt, van de stellaire zwarte gaten (enkele zonsmassa's groot), via de Intermediate Mass Black Hole's (IMBH), tot de supermassieve zwarte gaten in de kernen van sterrenstelsels (miljoenen tot miljarden zonsmassa's groot). Waarschijnlijk is er ook een slag mini-zwarte gaten, de zogenaamde primordial black holes (PBH's), die ontstaan zijn bij de oerknal, zo'n 13,7 miljard jaar geleden. Hebben stellaire zwarte gaten hun massa gepropt in een gebiedje met een diameter van zo'n twee kilometer, de PBH's kunnen een massa ter grootte van de Mount Everest in een volume kleiner dan een waterstofatoom hebben zitten. Als zo'n PBH een willekeurige astrobloglezer zou passeren dan zal die er niets van merken, sterker nog zo'n PBH vliegt ongemerkt dwars door de Aarde heen. Wat dat betreft zijn die microscopisch kleine zwarte gaten net neutrino's, want die vliegen ook dwars door je heen, al zijn dat er een tikkeltje meer. Maar volgens de Oekraïnse natuurkundige B.E. Zhilyaev is er toch een mogelijkheid dat die PBH's onderweg in een ster of planeet 'blijven hangen'. Hij heeft daarover een artikel geschreven getiteld Singular Sources of Energy in Stars and Planets en daarin zegt hij dat zo'n zwart gat eerst een baan volgt om het zwaartepunt in het midden van de ster of planeet. Dat kan miljarden jaren duren (!) en op een gegeven moment komt hij tot rust in dat centrum. In het geval van een ster zou de PBH extra warmte kunnen gaan produceren en zou de ster kunnen uitdijen en zelfs exploderen als een supernova. Mocht de PBH door een planeet ingevangen worden dan kan ook hier extra warmteproductie het gevolg zijn. Zhilyaev wijst er op dat planeten als Jupiter en Saturnus meer warmte produceren dan op grond van hun massa en afstand tot de Zon verklaard kan worden en dat een PBH een mogelijke bron is van die extra warmte. De massa van de PBH's moet in dat geval 4 x 1019 en 7 x 1018 gram voor Jupiter respectievelijk Saturnus bedragen. Er zou zich dus in beide planeten op dit moment een zwart gat kunnen bevinden! Een PBH binnenin de Aarde is ook een mogelijkheid. Die zou volgens Zhilyaev gunstig uit kunnen pakken, want lang nadat de Zon gestopt is met warmteproductie (over 5 miljard jaar zal dat het geval zijn) zou een PBH in de kern van de Aarde de temperatuur aan het oppervlak voor leven draaglijk kunnen maken. Goh, da's toch wel een opmerkelijk verhaal over zwarte gaten van die Oekraïner Zhilyaev. Waren zwarte gaten eerst de ultieme alles opvretende monsters die uit het kosmische meer van Loch Ness opdoemden, nu worden ze voorgesteld als de redders des Vaderlandsch, de eeuwigdurende warmtebron die letterlijk onder onze voeten de boel draaiende houdt. Het kan verkeren. Bron: Universe Today. [...]
January 17th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I don't believe in this theory. Tell me when u actually find a block hole inside our planet. I believe it is possible for there to be microscopic black hole but they are probably super rare and don't cause gravity in planets or stars.
February 18th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
How long would the black hole take to grow? If a microscopic black hole feel into the center of our planet and could only reach a few surrounding atoms, then it wouldn't expand all that much, right?
Or is this all hypothetical with no way to possibly guess at?