Last week, just about everyone I know asked me if a man-made black hole — which are predicted to form in a colossal new atom smasher called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — might soon squeeze the Earth into the size of a pea. (Now that would be a real blow to the faltering global economy.)

The question stemmed from a New York Times article on how a judge is calling for a more detailed inquiry into the matter.

My first thought was that a mini-black hole would evaporate into cosmic rays, via a process called Hawking radiation, before it could devour our home and the rest of the cosmic block. Experts agree, as SPACE.com learned two years ago.

Even if mini-black holes don’t evaporate, some physicists think ultra-powerful cosmic rays punching into atmospheric molecules on our planet would create them. Yet everything is peachy, despite cosmic rays hitting Earth countless times a day.

Death by a black hole sounds like a particularly exciting way to go out, but it’s not likely to happen to anyone on Earth, and probably never will. The nearest-known black hole is more than 1,600 light-years from us, or about 9,400 trillion miles (15,000 trillion km) away.

Might strangelets, those weird theoretical particles that could render Earth into a lifeless lump like Kurt Vonnegut’s imaginary “ice-nine”, be produced by the LHC? A small minority of physicists think yes, but no evidence yet exists to support the odd matter’s existence.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Space & Astronomy, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.