Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 4569680" data-attributes="member: 40227">You're right: astronomical black holes can be "observed" due to how they affect stuff around them.  The most direct way is that the matter falling into the black hole gets compressed, heats up, and emits light (I believe x-rays for the solar-mass type ones, radio waves for the one at the center of the galaxy --- because that one is so much more massive, light loses more energy escaping the gravitational pull).  So we can see the light that's emitted before the stuff falls into the black hole.  Also, the black hole at the center of the galaxy has been observed by noticing that some stars around the center of the galaxy are orbiting something that's very heavy and very small very quickly.  A black hole is about the only thing that it could be (and radio images make that even more dramatic).Now, talking about possible micro-black holes: (1) Our best understanding of the quantum nature of black holes is that they have a temperature, and the smaller ones have a higher temperature.  So these tiny black holes would emit a lot of stuff just because they're hot, like a fire emits light.  But they have a small total amount of energy, so you'd just end up with a spray of particles coming out quickly.  (2) If that's actually wrong, the black hole would just go flying out of the detector most likely without doing anything.  This is actually a likely scenario for all kinds of discoveries that the LHC could make (including some other dark matter candidates, to get back to the OP).  In that case, the detectors would notice the "missing momentum" -- all the energy and momentum of the particles are accounted for carefully, so something missing would be a big sign that something new has happened.</blockquote>

Verification