A fireball created in a particle accelerator bears a striking resemblance to a black hole – but thankfully not the sort that could consume the Earth.
A FIREBALL created in a particle accelerator bears a striking similarity to a black hole. But don’t panic: even if the controversial claim is true, it is not the sort of black hole that would cause Earth to disappear in a puff of radiation.
At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, beams of gold nuclei travelling at close to the speed of light are smashed into each other. The intense heat of the collision breaks down the nuclei into quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of all normal matter. These particles form a ball of plasma about 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun (New Scientist, 16 October 2004, p 35).
The fireball, which lasts a mere 10-23 seconds, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision.
Source: New Scientist
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