Tiny Black Holes Could Have Left Tunnels Inside Earth’s Rocks
December 19, 2024

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

Two imaginative cosmologists have good news for everyone: If a primordial black hole passed through your body, you might not die.

This unexpected reassurance is part of their larger hypothesis about where scientists might find primordial black holes (PBHs): ancient, tiny, high-density theoretical black holes. in a study Published in “December Issue” The physics of the dark universe Cosmologists believe evidence of PBHs may exist in hollow bodies as well as objects on Earth, and it has been available online since September.

Dejan Stojkovic of the University at Buffalo, who co-authored the study, said at a university: “We have to think outside the box because previous efforts to find primordial black holes Nothing works. statement.

“Familiar” black holes, if you can call them that, usually form after dying stars collapse inward. On the other hand, primordial black holes may have formed shortly after the Big Bang, when dense regions of space also collapsed inward, before stars even existed – so original part.

For decades, scientists have theorized about the existence of PBH but have never actually observed it. Based on this research, some scholars even believe that PBHs may be dark matter itself (the mysterious substance that accounts for 85% of the mass of the universe). “Small primordial black holes (PBHs) may be the most interesting and fascinating relics of the early universe,” the researchers wrote in the study.

Stojkovic and his colleagues calculated that if a very fast PBH with a mass of 2.2 x 10^19 pounds (that’s 22 followed by 18 zeros) shot through a solid object, it would leave a tunnel 0.1 microns thick. It’s small but still visible with powerful microscopes, meaning we can study surrounding objects for evidence of their existence.

Cosmologists say it’s more likely that older objects have PBH tunnels. The “higher possibility” is still quite slim – they calculated the chance of a PBH shooting through a billion-year-old boulder to be 0.000001% – but not zero.

“The chances of finding these signatures are small, but finding them doesn’t require many resources, and the potential reward (the first evidence of a primordial black hole) would be huge,” Stojkovic explained in the statement.

This brings us back to the likelihood of a PBH burrowing into your body, which is even less likely than through billion-year-old rock. However, even if this did happen, researchers believe you wouldn’t suffer major injury because the body’s tissues have lower tension, meaning the PBH will likely pass through without tearing.

“If the projectile moves through the medium faster than the speed of sound, then the molecular structure of the medium doesn’t have time to react,” Stojkovic said. “Throw a rock through a window and it will most likely shatter. Use a gun Shooting the window will most likely just leave a hole, and the PBH’s velocity will also prevent it from releasing most of its kinetic energy inside you.

Stojkovic and his colleagues Dechang Dai of National Dong Hua University and Case Western Reserve University also suggest looking for evidence of PBH in objects of surprisingly low quality. They hypothesized that if a PBH shot through an object such as a planet, moon, or asteroid with a liquid core, it could become trapped inside and evacuate the center, hollowing it out until an external impact dislodges it.

“If the object has a liquid central core, then the trapped PBH can absorb the liquid core, which has a higher density than the outer solid layer,” Stojkovic explains. On the other hand, objects without a liquid core would have microtunnels similar to solid objects on Earth.

The pair therefore suggested that astronomers look for objects with significantly lower densities (which can be calculated from their orbits) than expected. They also have to be smaller than one-tenth the radius of the Earth, since anything larger would collapse in on itself.

Although these parameters are, in Stojkovic’s own words, “out of the box,” the researchers stress that such theoretical studies are necessary. “The smartest people on Earth have been working on these problems for 80 years and they haven’t solved them yet,” he said. “We don’t need to directly extend the existing model. We may need a completely new framework.

While ordinary people won’t be participating in the new search for primordial black holes, if something unexpected passes through your body, that’s your signal to alert the scientific community.

2024-12-16 12:17:09

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