• Question: could the earth ever have a black hole

    Asked by Abu.D15 to Scott on 14 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      Good question! Some people were really worried that we might accidentally make mini black holes when we starting smashing particles together at the LHC (thankfully that didn’t happen!). Not everyone agrees that very little black holes exist though – if they did exist, we could probably have one near Earth without too many issues (in fact, Hawking recently proposed one as an energy source!

      )
      But it’s quite tricky, because even small-ish black holes could destroy the Earth in a few minutes – so we’d have to be very VERY careful 😉

Comments