Tiny Black Holes Could Have Left Tunnels Inside Earth's Rocks | Hacker News Reader

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

gizmodo.com

24 pointsrbanffy11 comments

"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?

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

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."

So, PBH eats the liquid core, leaving tennis ball(TB), then TB (with PBH still inside) has close approach to another more massive object (bowling ball?) which sends PBH and TB off in separate trajectories?

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

That explains it in a much better way.

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