Sunday, March 27, 2005
Black Hole in New York?
Here's a first: a U.S. particle accelerator has produced a "fireball" similar to a tiny black hole. Horatiu Nastase, physicist at Brown University in Rhode Island, has published a paper saying that by smashing gold nuclei traveling at speeds near the speed of light the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, New York made a fireball that was "the analog of a dual black hole." (see Black Hole Factory, Feb. 21)
Here's the catch: by analog he means "completely different from a black hole in the real universe; in particular, it cannot grow by gobbling up matter." He says that "because the amount of matter created at RHIC is so tiny, RHIC does not, and cannot possibly, produce a true, star-swallowing black hole."
In a nut, it's still not completely clear what the scientists at RHIC saw. Horatiu says that his fireball is just "mathematically similar" to a "real" black hole. Mathematically similar means that Nastase had to describe the fireball in 10 dimesions to make it look like a black hole. The black hole is "dual" becasue Nastase created a mathematical link between the "real" fireball and the imaginary 10-dimesional hole. Stay tuned for more details.
The New York Times published a nice wrap up on March 29.
Here's the catch: by analog he means "completely different from a black hole in the real universe; in particular, it cannot grow by gobbling up matter." He says that "because the amount of matter created at RHIC is so tiny, RHIC does not, and cannot possibly, produce a true, star-swallowing black hole."
In a nut, it's still not completely clear what the scientists at RHIC saw. Horatiu says that his fireball is just "mathematically similar" to a "real" black hole. Mathematically similar means that Nastase had to describe the fireball in 10 dimesions to make it look like a black hole. The black hole is "dual" becasue Nastase created a mathematical link between the "real" fireball and the imaginary 10-dimesional hole. Stay tuned for more details.
The New York Times published a nice wrap up on March 29.
