A pair of imaginative cosmologists have good news for everyone: If the primordial black hole passes through your body, you probably won’t die.
This unexpected confirmation is part of their larger hypothesis of where scientists can find primordial black holes (PBH): the oldest, smallest, most dense, theoretical black holes. In a study published in the December issue of The Physics of the Dark Universe and available online since September, cosmologists suggest that evidence of PBHs may exist within void space bodies, as well as in objects right here on Earth.
“We have to think outside the box because what has been done to find black holes before has never worked,” said Dejan Stojkovic of the University of Buffalo, who co-authored the study, in a university statement.
“Normal” black holes, if you can call them that, usually appear after dying stars fall inward. Black holes, on the other hand, may have formed soon after the Big Bang, when regions of dense space were also collapsing inward, before there were stars—so the first part.
Scientists have theorized the existence of PBHs for decades, but have never seen one. According to research, some scientists even suggest that PBHs may be dark matter itself (the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the mass of the universe). “Pub black holes (PBHs) are perhaps the most interesting and intriguing objects from the early universe,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Stojkovic and his colleagues calculated that if a superfast PBH weighing 2.2 x 10^19 pounds (that’s 22 followed by 18 zeros) fired at a solid object, it would leave behind a tunnel 0.1 micron thick. That’s small, but still visible with powerful microscopes, meaning we can probe the objects around us for evidence of their existence.
Older objects have a higher probability of spawning a PBH tunnel, according to cosmologists. The “high probability” is still very small—they calculated the probability of a PBH shooting out of a 1-billion-year-old rock to be 0.000001 percent—but not zero.
“The chances of finding these signatures are small, but searching for them will not require a lot of resources and the potential profit, the first evidence of a black hole, can be huge,” explained Stojkovic in a statement.
This brings us back to the odds of a PBH punching through your body, which is even lower than one approaching a billion-year-old rock. Even if it did happen, however, the researchers are confident that you won’t get serious damage, since human tissues have low resistance, which means that PBH will probably pass without suffering.
“If the projectile is traveling at a speed faster than the speed of sound, the molecular structure of the medium does not have time to react,” said Stojkovic. “Throw a stone through the window, it will probably shatter. Shoot the window with a gun, it might leave a hole.” The speed of the PBH will also prevent it from releasing its kinetic energy to your body.
Stojkovic and his colleagues, De-Chang Dai of National Dong Hwa University and Case Western Reserve University, also suggest looking for evidence of PBH in celestial bodies with surprisingly low masses. They think that if a PBH hits a body like a planet, moon, or celestial body with a liquid core, it may become trapped inside and dislodge its center, opening it up until an external impact dislodges it.
“If an object has a liquid core, then trapped PBH can absorb the liquid core, whose density is higher than the density of the outer solid layer,” explained Stojkovic. On the other hand, celestial bodies that do not have liquid fluids can carry small channels similar to those in solids on Earth.
As a result, the duo suggests that astronomers search for cosmic bodies with densities (not measured in their orbits) that are much lower than expected. They would also have to be smaller than one-tenth the diameter of the earth, since anything larger would collapse in on itself.
Although these frameworks are, in Stojkovic’s own words, “outside the box,” the researchers emphasize that such theoretical studies are necessary. “The smartest people in the world have been solving these problems for 80 years and they haven’t solved them yet,” he said. “We don’t need a direct extension of existing species. We probably need a whole new framework.”
While the average person won’t participate in the new hunt for black holes, this is your warning sign to the scientific community if something unexpected enters your body.
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