Timeline for What kind of matter would be needed to maintain a black hole?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 31, 2019 at 21:29 | comment | added | Muuski | If the incoming particle misses the black hole even by a little bit, wouldn't it enter a highly elliptical (or even hyperbolic) orbit and come back to the feeder? Probably torn to pieces by the tidal forces, and thus, I guess, fulfilling the purpose of generating energy... | |
| Dec 31, 2019 at 18:17 | comment | added | FlyingLemmingSoup | @StarfishPrime That's what I meant, I think I just phrased it wrong. What I meant was: By the time you get a micro black hole large enough that it can be easily fed by just throwing regular matter at it, it will probably have a power output that's far too low to be productive. A productive kugelblitz will probably have a mass of several million tons, and at that size will be smaller than an atomic nucleus. A black hole with a diameter of a centimeter would have the approximate mass of Mars, and probably give off too little hawking radiation to be useful. | |
| Dec 31, 2019 at 9:08 | comment | added | Starfish Prime | @FlyingLemmingSoup you've got that backwards... the power of the Hawking radiation increases as the mass of the black hole decreases. Big holes (eg. stellar mass ones) just have too low a Hawing radiation power to be useful by themselves, though assembling an accretion disk around them can still be productive. | |
| Dec 31, 2019 at 6:29 | history | edited | FlyingLemmingSoup | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 31, 2019 at 6:07 | comment | added | FlyingLemmingSoup | @StarfishPrime The smaller-than-atom sized black hole I was talking about IS the size with a lifespan measured in centuries/millennia, one where the rate of evaporation via Hawking radiation is (theoretically) enough to make for an excellent reactor. I suspect that a black hole loses enough energy output to be useful long before it gets large enough to be easily fed by ordinary matter. | |
| Dec 31, 2019 at 2:45 | vote | accept | carsonogen089 | ||
| Dec 23, 2019 at 13:09 | comment | added | Starfish Prime | @carsonogen089 if you can make a black hole out of regular matter via some Suitably Advanced implosion technique, you just need to make it big enough that you can feed it. At that point though its lifespan is probably going to be measured in centuries (at a minimum) so there isn't actually much need to feed it in the first place... just keep it until it gets too hazardous, then fire it out into space and admire the fireworks when it finally goes pop. | |
| Dec 23, 2019 at 13:06 | comment | added | Starfish Prime | You might be able to feed such a black hole with an x-ray or gamma-ray laser of suitably short wavelength and high power, though there's an upper limit to the electrical field strength of a laser before it starts doing pair production from the quantum vacuum. | |
| Dec 23, 2019 at 8:13 | comment | added | FlyingLemmingSoup | Not to my knowledge. Off the top of my head, I know of one other means to extract energy from a black hole, but it requires the more traditional style of black hole which is several solar masses in size, not suitable for a reactor. | |
| Dec 23, 2019 at 8:05 | comment | added | carsonogen089 | Is there another kind of artificial black hole that would be better suited to a reactor? | |
| Dec 23, 2019 at 7:58 | history | answered | FlyingLemmingSoup | CC BY-SA 4.0 |