• Question: Would it be possible to make a black hole?

    Asked by pedro1234 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 14 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      So we sort of already have. At CERN (a big particle accelerator under the French-Swiss border), particles are moving so fast that when they collide they create enough energy to make tiny black holes. These evaporate immediately (Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes evaporate very slowly, which is a story for another time!) – I think I remember reading that you’d need to make a black hole as massive as a mountain to make it stable.

      But if you mean a proper black hole like we find in space – sure, eventually why not? All you have to do is squeeze enough stuff together so that the neutrons collapse into each other and form a piece of matter so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. Or you could cheat and blow up a star that’s already going to go supernova. But this is a little while away yet.

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 14 Jun 2013:

      Yeah, it definitely would be!

      There is a (small) possibility that we could make one at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In fact, before the LHC started, there was some worry by the public that the LHC would create a black hole that could then swallow up the earth! One crazy guy even went as far as trying to sue CERN and getting the LHC shut down (unsuccessfully, of course).

      But before you get too excited, the black holes we could make at the LHC would be microscopic – somewhere between the size of an atom to a fraction of a millimeter. This is why we aren’t worried about them, because black holes as small as these would actually “evaporate” in a burst of light 🙂

      And, also unfortunately, this could only happen if the universe we live in has extra dimensions. Right now we have 3 space dimensions (up/down, right/left, forward/back) and time, a total of 4. If we had extra space dimensions that are large enough (about the same size as the black hole we wanted to make, still less than a mm though) then there is the possibility to create them.

      We actually have teams of people on the experiments searching for these micro black holes, but unfortunately we haven’t seen any yet. It would be really awesome if we did, though, because, well, black holes! but also because that would tell us that we lived in a universe with extra dimensions!

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