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How movable are miniature black holes?

Worldbuilding Asked on November 30, 2021

I’ve purchased a miniature black hole on ebay. I’ve heard they make excellent kitchen disposal units. Unfortunately the seller says it is for collection only.

Will I be able to move it?

Anti-gravity mats are the latest thing – I’ve already got one and tried it out. It’s great fun.

Question

Even if I take my anti-gravity mat with me, will I be able to move the mini black hole? I’ll have to push it parallel to the Earth’s surface and I’m concerned I’ll never get it moving because of inertia.

Are there any other snags I should be aware of?


Note: Anti-gravity mats work rather like a magic carpet but not quite. If you place a heavy weight on top of them, they behave like an immensely strong table. The advantage is that they can be moved sideways with little or no friction.

Correction It seems that I was wrong. Anti-gravity mats are impervious to gravity passing through them. Apparently this is similar to how a Faraday cage works.

2 Answers

If you precharge your black hole you may be able to hold it in a penning trap. Black holes conserve charge, so if you feed in a bunch of electrons then you can end up with a negatively charged black hole. A big issue is that it gets harder and harder to push new electrons in the more negatively charged it gets, and how do you hold your black hole at the endpoint of a huge particle accelerator before it is charged. I imagine you would do it in space with many accelerators shooting at it from all sides and active feedback to modulate the strength of the accelerators to keep the black hole centered.

Of course then you have the issue of getting the black hole to earth and moving a penning trap the size of a city block.

Answered by John Meacham on November 30, 2021

In the comments, you say:

It has to be big enough to last for at least a year in my kitchen. I don't know how to calculate this.

I don't know either because I'm the wrong kinda nerd for this, but the right kind of nerds have created online calculators for us. I used this one to estimate a mass of 7.2 $times$ 107 kilograms. That's seventy thousand metric tons, or 2.5 times the weight of Lady Liberty.

The problem is not the mass but the density. Still according to the calculator, the black hole would have a radius of 10-19 meters. I know no material that could withstand that much weight on such a small point. If you magic mat can withstand it, though, a few locomotives working together or a really big cargo ship could maybe be able to move it.

Also, its surface gravity would be almost half of Earth's. You've got quite a beast there. But the kicker is that it would would be 1.7 quadrillion Kelvins hot, so even with your magic mat the air around it will accrete into a disc and emit enough x-ray radiation to cause a planetary catastrophe. You might consider keeping your black hole away from the solar system instead, for safety.

Answered by The Square-Cube Law on November 30, 2021

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