Tiny Black Holes Could Have Left Tunnels Inside Earth's Rocks

https://gizmodo.com/tiny-black-holes-could-have-left-tunnels-inside-earths-rocks-2000538216

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

24 11 2 years ago

codezero• 2 years ago

Aren’t actual black holes electromagnetically charged? That would certainly be a problem if your body was bombarded by them, right?

Referring to this quote: If a primordial black hole tunnels through your body, you probably won’t die.

From searching it’s unclear if these journal articles are peer reviewed. Some say yes. Others say no?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257744685_Welcome_t...

andrewflnr• 2 years ago

In general, no. I'm not a physicist, but I get the impression that black holes are actually expected to shed any charge pretty aggressively via hawking radiation.

kijin• 2 years ago

According to the article, a rock has a 0.000001% chance of having been hit by a PBH in the last billion years. It's entirely possible that not a single human being has been hit by a PBH in the last million years. "Bombarded" doesn't do justice to the low concentration of these projectiles.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

What an awful website. The moment I reach first ad, in iOS Safari, it crashes whole tab.

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

What is the value of this kind of research? It seems so… pointless.

tc4v• 2 years ago

You have to distinguish the actual research from what is relayed by the article. These people are looking for proofs existence of a theoretical objects, the primordial black holes. Finding them would: 1. add proofs to the validity of the current model of the big bang and 2. help quantify the PBHs which we can then add with more certainty to the model. That's obviously very fundamental research, it's not going to lead to application any time soon, but general relativity was too in the 30' and yet we wouldn't have GPS without it.

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

That explains it in a much better way.

Crunchified2• 2 years ago

"Stojkovic and his colleague, De-Chang Dai of National Dong Hwa University and Case Western Reserve University, also suggest looking for PBH evidence in celestial bodies with surprisingly low masses. They posit that if a PBH shot through a body such as a planet, moon, or asteroid with a liquid core, it might get trapped inside and vacuum up its center, hollowing it out until an external impact dislodged it."

Please explain how this phenomenon would lessen a celestial body's mass?

clort• 2 years ago

if it was dislodged, all the mass it had vacuumed up would go with it?

Crunchified2• 2 years ago

Yeah, OK, it did say that. But the reasoning behind this rather complex scenario (i.e., the process) is left up to us to figure out. "The thing came in here, sucked out all the juice, and then left a while later leaving just the crust behind, like an old chewed out tennis ball."

Tiny Black Holes Could Have Left Tunnels Inside Earth's Rocks

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