The good thing about miniature black holes is that the Hawking radiation actually is really important because the smaller they get, the bigger the Hawking radiation effect becomes. "It would be really cool, I think, to be able to make a little miniature black hole. It wasn't as crazy a question as you might think. "Years ago, people were very nervous about the Large Hadron Collider-whether it was going to blow up the Earth. Some of which could be within 20 or 30 light-years, which is pretty close by in astronomical terms." What if we could create a black hole right here on Earth? So one of the things I'm working on is coming up with new ways of finding those other 100 million black holes sprinkled throughout the Milky Way. We've only ever really detected about 20 or 30 of them. "And there should be literally hundreds of millions of black holes, just sprinkled throughout the Milky Way. "There's a new NASA X-ray telescope that we're launching, I think this summer or it might get pushed off a little bit, which is going to look at something called X-ray polarization that will tell us essentially the shape of the black hole-something really, really cool to measure. With the LIGO gravitational wave detector we've seen or heard or detected many small black holes merging. "We would really love to be able to see two supermassive black holes merge. Solarseven/iStock What are you trying to observe in black holes right now? Scientists are still trying to learn more about the cosmic giants. It's like walking into a daycare and seeing a bunch of 90-year-old people, like what are they doing here? How could these big things have grown up and become so large and so powerful, so early on? That's a big, big question in astronomy right now."Īn artist's impression of a black hole bending spacetime. We know that they existed very early on, when the universe was relatively young, let's say even a billion years old or less. "One of the things I mentioned before, the supermassive black holes? We don't really know where they came from. Either way, it's a highly idealized theoretical situation that would be very difficult to measure in practice." The other idea is that every single photon that comes back out has, encoded in it, some of the information that went in. And all of the radiation that eventually comes out is just kind of noise. One is that it just gets totally jumbled up. "Famous question: if you throw an Encyclopedia Britannica into a black hole, where does all that information go? Does it just get stuck in there forever? Is that ever possible to reproduce by figuring out exactly what way it comes out? I think the jury's still out on that one. It's a good field to be in because there's a lot of things that we don't know. So you really would need to take a perfect black hole and put it in a perfect vacuum with nothing else before the Hawking radiation would even have a chance at doing anything." So if you think about it, the black hole is never even going to start shrinking until it starts giving off more Hawking radiation than it's pulling in from other background radiation. And of course, there is other stuff in the universe, right? There's this whole cosmic background radiation. But Hawking radiation is a very, very weak form of radiation and never been actually detected. "In terms of black holes' lifespan, any sort of black hole like that is basically going to live forever trillions and trillions of years longer than we expect anything else in the universe to survive." And they eventually die when they release all their energy as Hawking radiation, right? They fit in the middle of the galaxy, we have one in the Milky Way called Sagittarius A*. And we don't really know where they came from. And these are the ones that are millions or even billions of times the size of the sun. "And then there's the other type, basically the other flavor of black hole, which is called the supermassive black hole. The gravity wins out, you blow out some of the outer parts-that's what makes the supernova-and then the rest collapses down to a black hole. All that it has left is gravity, and not enough energy to keep it hot and hold it from collapsing. "We think most black holes are formed in a supernova, when you have a very massive star that reaches the end of its lifetime when it runs out of fuel. Where do we think most black holes come from? How and When to Watch SpaceX Launch NASA Astronauts to the ISS.A Coin-Sized Black Hole Would Destroy Earth-Here's How.NASA Shows Video of 2 Black Holes Dance Around, Bend Light Off Each Other.
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