- A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the
characteristics of a black hole, a physicist has said.
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- It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC) in New York, US, which smashes beams of gold nuclei together at
near light speeds.
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- Horatiu Nastase says his calculations show that the core
of the fireball has a striking similarity to a black hole.
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- His work has been published on the pre-print website
arxiv.org and is reported in New Scientist magazine.
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- When the gold nuclei smash into each other they are broken
down into particles called quarks and gluons.
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- These form a ball of plasma about 300 times hotter than
the surface of the Sun. This fireball, which lasts just 10 million, billion,
billionths of a second, can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles
produced by the beam collisions.
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- But Nastase, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode
Island, says there is something unusual about it.
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- Ten times as many jets were being absorbed by the fireball
as were predicted by calculations.
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- The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing
into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as
matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking"
radiation.
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- However, even if the ball of plasma is a black hole,
it is not thought to pose a threat. At these energies and distances, gravity
is not the dominant force in a black hole.
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- © BBC MMV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4357613.stm
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