Posted by Davin Flateau on 16 Feb 2006 at 5:53 pm.
Filed under General, Astronomy.
There’s a theory that subatomic particles from space hitting our atmosphere may create incredibly tiny short-lived subatomic black holes right here inside Earth’s own air supply. It’s a wild theory that has has a lot of implications, from the possibility of scientists creating their own tiny black holes in the lab, to the confirmation of extra spacial dimensions that some physicists (and science fiction authors) have been theorizing about.
The atmospheric black hole theory is a pretty wild one, and is treated with a fair bit of skepticism from astrophysicists. But proponents of the idea thought that the only way to know for sure was to actually go and look for one. They plan to use the Auger Observatory in Argentina, a special observatory that uses water tanks and ultraviolet light imaging, to look at the shower of cosmic ray particles that rain down on us after radiation from space hits Earth’s atmosphere.
But a recent paper in Physical Review Letters may toss a wet blanket onto the atmospheric black hole theory somewhat.
Looking for black holes in the atmosphere is one of the prominent missions for the newly built Pierre Auger Observatory. Black holes can arise from the collapse of heavy stars but might also, according to theoretical particle physics, be produced when cosmic ray particles (especially neutrinos) with multi-TeV energies pass very close to a particle within our atmosphere. The ensuing air shower of secondary particles would be sensed on the ground in Auger’s huge array of detectors, which began their work in 2003 (see figure at Physics News Graphics).
A new analysis of this hypothetical black hole production process, however, questions whether many such mini-black-hole events would occur. According to Dejan Stojkovic (Case Western Reserve University) and his colleagues, the same process that encourages black hole creation in cosmic-ray neutrino scattering events at the TeV energy level (rather than at the impossibly inaccessible 1019-GeV level, referred to as the Planck energy) also should hasten the decay of protons to an extent not seen in experiments designed to look for them.
Therefore, Stojkovic (dejan@balin.phys.cwru.edu) argues, the robust stability of the proton militates against an expected mini-black-hole production of several hundred events over the Auger Observatory’s active period from 2003 to 2008. This doesn’t necessarily mean that no black hole events would seen, but probably not as many as were once anticipated.
The Reader’s Digest version of the paper: Nuances in subatomic physics make these tiny black holes, if they are created, a lot rarer that previously thought. The telescope looking for one to be created may have to wait a bit longer than previously thought. I’m sure this won’t deter the searchers from looking — all they need is to record that one atmospheric event to prove that black holes are a lot closer than we think.
dummy on 9 Sep 2007 at 4:10 pm: 1
what about subatomic black-holes forming subatomic wormholes where an electron in a probability shell might disappear from one location and reappear in another location within that shell ?