Thread: Scientists Create Artificial Black Hole in Lab

Scientists Create Artificial Black Hole in Lab

Saturday, March 08, 2008

By Charles Q. Choi

The mysterious properties of black holes can be recreated on a tabletop, scientists now reveal.

Solving mysteries concerning black holes could yield key clues toward a "theory of everything" that unites how we conceive of all the natural forces.

Black holes rank among the greatest enigmas of the universe. Scientists theorize black holes have gravitational pulls so powerful that nothing, including light, can escape after falling past a border known as the event horizon.

Direct experiments with black holes are unlikely, due at the very least to the distance any are from Earth, not to mention how difficult these warps in space and time would be to work with.

Instead, researchers are searching for ways to create lab models of event horizons.

Now scientists have created an artificial event horizon on a tabletop using fiber optics

The researchers started by firing a stream of intense, brief laser pulses inside an optical fiber. These pulses acted like a current of flowing light.

Such intense, brief pulses "make physical effects visible that would also occur for much longer and weaker pulses, but are hard to detect there," explained researcher Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "High intensity and short pulses are needed for seeing subtle effects and discriminating them from noise."

At the same time, the researchers fired a continuous beam of infrared light down the optical fiber. This beam created waves that got overtaken by the laser flow, resembling how light waves are overcome by the gravitational pull just past an event horizon.

"The most surprising aspect for me is how simple it actually is to create artificial event horizons," Leonhardt told LiveScience.

He and his colleagues detailed their findings in the March 7 issue of the journal Science.

Scientists had proposed other systems to mimic aspects of black holes. All those, however, needed moving parts — specifically, very fragile, ultra-cold blobs of matter — and none of them have yet successfully displayed phenomena resembling event horizons.

The artificial event horizons Leonhardt and his colleagues have devised could help researchers explore bizarre aspects of black holes, such as radiation they are supposed to emit.

Black holes are not entirely black. Physicist Stephen Hawking discovered that all black holes should instead evaporate at least a bit, leaking energy dubbed "Hawking radiation."

Scientists have not yet seen this mysterious energy — Hawking radiation from normal black holes is completely obscured by the cosmic microwave background, radiation left over from the Big Bang that pervades the entire universe.

However, Leonhardt suggests that with their new lab model, "we can create artificial event horizons that would generate enough Hawking radiation to be detectable."

A greater understanding of Hawking radiation could help unite our currently disparate theories of physics into one "theory of everything" that could conceive of all the natural forces.

So far scientists have not successfully united the field of general relativity, which explains how matter and energy behave at large scales and predicts the existence of black holes, with that of quantum mechanics, which helps explain how matter and energy act at atomic and subatomic levels and predicts the existence of Hawking radiation.

A better understanding of Hawking radiation could help bridge general relativity with quantum mechanics to understand how these "worlds are connected," Leonhardt explained.

FOXNews.com - Scientists Create Artificial Black Hole in Lab - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News


How exciting and cool is this?!

I love watching The Universe of the History Channel and they did a great episode on black holes. Interesting stuff!

Science is amazing!

Damn that is flipping crazy.
I wonder how they will be applying there finds.
and
Ya that that episode on black holes was amazing, but then again, the whole series of The Universe is spectacular.

Yeah it's almost as good as the planet Earth series. Today they had an episode where they talked about the 13th horoscope sign and stars and suns. Cool stuff.

I never seen it but it sounds pretty cool. History and Discovery Channel ARE the sh*t

In one of the big super-colliders, they are going to attempt to make microscopic black holes smaller than the size of an atom. Prepare to have the earth sucked up into an experiment gone awry.

BTW, I heard somewhere that the words "black hole" mean something nasty in Russian slang, so they use a different term when translating in scientific papers. I guess the Russians don't like the idea of things being sucked into their "black hole."

Originally Posted by dragonrider

Prepare to have the earth sucked up into an experiment gone awry.

I don't think we'll have to worry about that. All object of mass attract other objects of mass. the only reason black holes have that pulling force is because at the centre is an enormous amount of mass with an enormous gravitational pull. So we shouldn't be able to create anything powerful enough to pose serious threat.

"dude, I dare you to put your hand in it"

I wonder if it is possible to create black hole matter out of THC crystals and then smoke it.

Originally Posted by McLeodGanja

I wonder if it is possible to create black hole matter out of THC crystals and then smoke it.

Haha Like an infinately dense block of hash that could burn for an age

Anyone seen those guys lately? It's been awfully quiet in the lab....just sayin'..