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Old 07-September-2008, 07:02 AM
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Van Rijn Van Rijn is offline
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Originally Posted by a system View Post
I read this saftey report on the production of blackholes, and although it seems to debunk the idea of a blackhole gobbling up the galaxy, it also says that if a blackhole were to become stable and start growing, it would take a longer time to consume the Earth than the lifespan of our solar system. Isnt that kind of nerving and basically saying that it could eat our planet, but only a couple of millimeters every couple of years?
It's putting constraints on what a hypothetical stable black hole could do if it existed. There are a number of lines of arguments, but a key one is that if were possible for micro stable black holes to occur on Earth, they would also occur on white dwarfs and neutron stars due to natural high energy events. These are much denser than Earth, so, assuming micro stable black holes, would be converted into black holes far more rapidly than Earth. The population of white dwarfs and neutron stars we observe means that if micro stable black holes did exist they would take longer than the lifespan of our solar system to consume the planet.

None of this means that stable micro black holes exist or can eat planets.
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