Hadron Collider: Will we be sucked in?

Better than on the edge of a desk!

THE “big bang machine” which some fear could cause the end of the world will be switched back on in October.<

The £4bn large hadron collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

Buried deep under the the Franco-Swiss border at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), the machine is designed to collide opposing particle beams at near light speed.

The hope is the titanic collisions will recreate – in miniature – the almost unimaginable conditions at the very dawn of time, the so-called Big Bang.

Read complete article here {via WalesOnline}

Man-made Black Hole (credit: Fresh News)

Man-made black holes, sounds a bit dicey to me.

A team of physicists have created an artificial black hole in their lab that traps sound instead of light, in an attempt to detect the theoretical Hawking radiation.

The radiation, proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, causes black holes to evaporate over time.

Astrophysical black holes are created when matter becomes so dense that it collapses to a point called a singularity.

The black hole’s gravity is so great that nothing – not even light – can escape from a boundary around it called an event horizon.

Read complete article here. {via Fresh News}

ESA (Image by C. Carreau)

Using indirect observations, a team of astronomers has gotten the closest look ever at the region of space around a supermassive black hole.

It is tough to image something that devours any electromagnetic radiation that gets too close to it, light included. But, since black holes warp space so severely, once mass or energy gets too close, it can no longer be observed by someone in our universe. Because of this, astronomers who study black holes are forced to use less direct methods for determining the nature of these beasts.

Thankfully for those interested in black holes, matter leaves behind a trail of X-rays as it enters its death throes prior to being accreted into a black hole. As matter swirls around a black hole, it gets accelerated to speeds near that of light, and becomes so hot it begins to emit X-rays. Since various elements emit unique spectral lines, astronomers can look at the X-ray spectra coming from a supermassive black hole and get a sense of what is falling into it.

Read complete article here. {via arstechnica.com}