Tiny Shiny Black Holes

when astronomers study the heavens black hole was represented that baya moths of the universe but could it be possible to make a smaller black hole one which could fit into the palm of your hand or even power a civilization today we'll explore the physics of tiny shiny black holes you black holes perhaps the most mysterious and bizarre type of object found in our universe black holes form when massive stars which the end of their lives and their cause no longer supported by nuclear energy collapse in on themselves under gravity these imploding course form a singularity a point of infinite density puncturing a hole in space-time itself yet any closer than the so called event horizon distance and nothing can escape their awesome gravity not even light as the product of massive dead stars and black holes tend to be massive as well the lightest known examples are just a few times heavier than our Sun but if you journey to the center of many galaxies you find super massive and juggernauts for example our own Milky Way host Sagittarius a star a Bey a moth weighing in at about four million Suns supermassive black holes are so large that it's even possible to take images of their event horizons as first demonstrated last year with this famous event horizon telescope image of Messier 87 star but black holes don't always have to be so massive in principle anything could really become a black hole if you just squeezed it down small enough it could be the Sun the earth your house or even you micro black holes there's three ways micro black holes could form the first is simply to wait a very very long time all black holes radiate away a tiny fraction of their energy each second through a process known as Hawking radiation this is a quantum effect which occurs on the event horizon boundary first deduced by the late and brilliant Stephen Hawking now through this loss of energy gradual as it may be black holes slowly lose mass and I cannot emphasize the word slowly enough here because for Sagittarius a star for example it would take a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times longer than the age of the universe so far for that white hole to lose all of its mass alas a short way of making a micro black hole is a so-called primordial black hole these are hypothesized to have formed shortly after the Big Bang during which time the universe was a hot heterogeneous soup of mass and energy because the density of matter is heterogeneous in this early universe some parts a little bit denser than others and these denser pockets may have collapsed under their own self gravity to have formed these primordial black holes and these masses could have been much smaller than that of stars as small as even the Planck mass just 22 micrograms it's even been suggested that an ocean of these primordial black holes could explain the source of dark matter in the universe although recent studies have cast doubt on that idea stellar-mass black holes have plenty of evidence for them at this point from gravitational waves detected by ly go to the x-ray sources of their accretion disks and even now images of their event horizons but when it comes to primordial black holes well we really don't know for sure where these things really formed they are more theoretical at this point one of the more speculative ideas about these is that Planet 9 the hypothesized super earth-mass planet in the outer solar system could actually be a primordial black hole as suggested by Unwin and schultz recently whilst this would certainly explain why it's being difficult to detect Planet 9 at thus far there really isn't any evidence for this idea right now and so personally I'm rather skeptical but if this idea is correct and given the fact that Planet 9 should be about ten earth masses then that would mean that this black hole would be the size of a bowling ball it would mean that you could literally put your hands around an object that is ten times heavier than the entire planet but I wouldn't recommend touching it in fact come within ten kilometers of the thing and the gravitational pull on one side of your body versus the other that's what we call a tidal force would be intense so intense that it would rip the limbs off your body a little bit like a medieval torture rack if we don't want to wait for eons and we don't want to try and find a primordial black hole then a third way of obtaining a black hole is simply to make one the recipe isn't as simple as baking a cake but theoretically it could be possible to cook up a micro black hole one way of doing this might be just smash particles together inside a particle accelerator at enormous energies indeed this was something that physicists hope to see in the Large Hadron Collider that was built in Switzerland really the Large Hadron Collider never had enough power to ever produce black holes that's because according to the standard model the smallest black hole possible is a Planck mass that's 22 micrograms and 22 micrograms converted into electron volts would be about 10,000 trillion terror' electron volts and the LHC produces nowhere near that its maximum power output is 13 tera electron volts a long long way off some theories involving extra spatial dimensions might get around this and let micro black holes form in the LHC but even if they did they'd almost instantaneously evaporate through Hawking radiation and of course we know that the LHC has never reported seeing such things despite their best efforts to seek them by trying to form a black hole through collisions much of the energy here is in the form of kinetic energy of the particles rather than in the masses of the particles themselves and so we can actually imagine taking this to the extreme imagine having aims of energy come together to a concentrated point so much so that they actually form a black hole at that point and that would be known as a kugelblitz when I talk to the public about black holes the most common viewpoint I hear is that they are lethal menaces that spell imminent demise for anyone nearby but that's not always true if we replaced the Sun with a solar mass black hole the earth would continue to follow the exact same orbit it wouldn't suddenly fall into the black hole and that's because the earth is already falling towards the Sun due to gravity in the same way that the International Space Station is currently falling towards the earth due to gravity it's just that both of them have enough sideways motion if you like that they are maintaining a constant altitude and that's what we call an orbit having said that turning the Sun into a black hole might not immediately kill us but it would indeed lead to a longer-term demise since without the sun's warmth we die pretty quick now if we manufactured a black hole in the laboratory we wouldn't be in orbit of it and so things would play out differently unlike an orbiting body we would presumably be stationary relative to this newborn black hole let's call it Freddie imagine that Freddie was born with an event horizon about a micron across a cute little fella a little bit smaller than a bacterium but don't let very small size fool you because Freddie is in fact about half the mass of the dwarf planet Ceres now of course we have no way of realistically manufacturing such a heavy black hole but let's just run with it for the moment now after its creation their parents are Freddie need not run into the lab to see their newborn creation in fact anyone within 50 kilometers of Freddie would be forcibly pulled towards this new creation stronger than the force of gravity due to the earth and yet more anyone within 300 meters of Freddie would be torn to shreds due to the tidal forces but Freddie likely wouldn't hang around too long sinking into the Earth's interior and feasting on anything it comes into contact with consuming the earth from the inside out our home planet would eventually end up as an accretion disk feeding this terrible creation helping it to grow into an earth-mass black hole about the size of a marble now Hawking radiation won't save us here because given Freddie's mass it would take 200 trillion trillion trillion years for Freddie to eventually evaporate and die but that same Hawking radiation is kind of interesting now because Freddie is producing radiation with a wavelength of 10 microns that's the same wavelength that a warm body of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or 300 Kelvin would produce and so in other words unlike where I am right now Freddie would be rather warm the warmth emanating off micro black holes poses the interesting possibility of harvesting the energy from them to power a civilization now 10 micron radiation would be quite easy to work with it would be absorbed by most materials warming them up and allowing us to power a steam engine for energy but the trouble is that Freddie is so damn small that it doesn't emit much of the stuff I mean the radiating surface of this black hole is the event horizon which is just a micron across and so that means that the surface area of this radiating surface is four million times less than that of a pinhead and so it doesn't really matter that Freddie is warm its surface area is so small it's not producing much power in fact it would produce just two nano watts of power now Hawking radiation isn't the only game in town for turning black holes and logical machines for example we've already discussed on this channel how black holes could power an interstellar proportion system that I devised known as the halo drive I'm also working on a way to use the halo drive to be used as an institute power station without proportion so make sure you stay tuned for that as another example others have suggested that throwing matter into a black hole should create Jets that could be harvested but Hawking radiation has probably received the most interest because here you can use these microscopic artificial black holes as essentially unbelievably high density batteries Hawking radiation is like a leaking black hole the smaller the black hole the worse the leak the worse it is at holding on to what little mass it has left in fact the power emitted due to Hawking radiation by a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass squared that means if I have the mass of a black hole I would quadruple the power output from that same black hole okay so the way to turn Freddie into a useful power station is not to make it bigger but actually to do the opposite to make a lower mass black hole now this seems paradoxical because the light of the black hole the smaller its event horizon and thus the smaller the radiating surface area of that event horizon should be right so surely this should produce less power that all sounds perfectly true except for the fact that the smaller the black hole the hotter it is the Hawking radiation temperature goes up much faster and so it actually ends up that that effect wins out and overall the light of the black hole the more power it produces all right so if we want some useful amount of energy from a black hole let's make it a thousand megawatts in power similar to our largest power stations here on earth such a black hole would have a mass of 600 million tons which is about the mass of a small mountain and evaporation here would be slow enough that this black hole would serve as a stable power source for hundreds of billions of years sounds great but there is a downside the downside here is that the peak wavelength of the Hawking radiation coming off this thing would be just 14 femtometers or convert it to an energy that'd be 10 million electron volts this is deep into the gamma ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum and that stuff is hard to stop the photons just travel through star even more so than x-rays so to make this work you have to encase the black hole in a thick solid shell about six centimeters of tungsten would absorb more than 99% for example remember that the black hole wants to sink under the gravity of the earth and so somehow you have to levitate the black hole up against Earth's gravity or indeed any other perturbing force because if you don't well you know how that means now one trick that we could potentially use here is to electrically charge our black holes black holes famously obey the no-hair theorem which means they're described by just three numbers their mass their spin and their charge if you know those three numbers then you can derive all of the intrinsic properties of a black hole and so electrical charge is allowed although it turns out that black holes are incredibly poor capacitors the maximum charge that our 1,000 megawatt black hole could hold onto would be just 50 coulombs give it any more than that and it would become a naked singularity which would mean that it would be a singularity without an event horizon and that's generally thought to be forbidden but we can dump far more charge into the tungsten shell it has plenty of electron we can strip off another thing that helps us here is that the electric force is far stronger than the gravitational force and so it might be possible to trap a 1,000 megawatt black hole inside a 12 centimeter diameter electrically charged tungsten shell now at least the black hole couldn't escape and sink into the earth one engineering problem to deal with now is that a thousand megawatts is a lot of power for such a small bore to be able to handle this means that might have to expand this shell much more or use a fast-flowing cooling fluid to get the heat away quickly okay so does this mean that we have solved humanity's energy needs could we look forward to a bright future powered by a micro black holes no the truth is as I hope is clear from this video that making these artificial micro black holes is incredibly difficult trying to just compress that amount of matter into such a small space is beyond our capabilities our best bet might be to try and smash particles together at very high energies or even try the kugelblitz but whichever of those two methods we use we require a machine with an energy output equivalent to 600 million tons worth of mass or 5 times 10 to the 28 joules of energy and even if we could somehow divert the entire global power production into some giant limitless battery it would still take us 200 million years to charge up that battery with enough energy so that we could produce our thousand megawatt black hole even trying to make a Planck mass black hole one which would evaporate instantaneously is 15 orders of magnitude more energy than our largest particle accelerator can muster so I would say that the idea of us building a micro black hole like this is a very distant eligible prospect and by the time we are capable of doing that who knows what else we'll be able to do maybe by then just be far simpler to fly to the nearest natural black hole or perhaps we'll be people of building a Dyson Sphere around our star or who knows maybe some other as yet and imagine technology but let me know what you would do if you were able to have a tiny black hole like this what would you use it for would use it to power your house your civilization your spaceship or maybe just put it on your mantelpiece so thank you so much for watching this video and until the next one stay thoughtful and stay curious

Channel: Cool Worlds

Views: 87,979

Rating: 4.9286714 out of 5

Keywords: black holes, singularity, stephen hawking, hawking radiation, tiny black holes, micro black holes, evaporating black hole, messier 87*, microscopic black hole, black hole powered, black hole civilization, black hole starship, shiny tiny black hole, david kipping, cool worlds lab, astronomy, astrophysics, futurism

Id: L6GCpvG8xJM

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019