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Humans developed a new weapon:

Black hole launcher.

How it works:

A mobile particle acelerator acelerates two particles to huge speeds and collide both. A mini black hole is created. The mini black hole flies throughout a barrel containing a magnetic field, again accelerating (the original particles where of the same charge) towards outside the weapon, while the weapon barrel contains pieces of material with high neutron absorption cross section, intended to feed the black hole. The idea is to have a anti-planetary weapon. If the black hole enters the planet core it will slowly consume the planet to nothingness.

Question:

Is it feasible? How long would take to consume the planet? If the two particles being collided are of the same charge, will the black hole keep the charge? Can a small black hole be contained magnetically (if charged)? Can it be fed with pieces of material dense enough to increase the probability of the black hole hitting something? If fed, how big does it need to be to have a certainty of hitting ordinary matter crossed by it (i.e. matter of the targeted planet - earthlike)?

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    $\begingroup$ A similar idea was the Point Singularity Projector weapon from the Andromeda tv series. That fired microscopic black holes at whatever you fancied. $\endgroup$
    – squigbobble
    Mar 15, 2016 at 17:23

3 Answers 3

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Unfortunately I don't think this will work. You're going to run into Hawking Radiation.

Basically that's a quantum effect that causes black holes to emit radiation, causing them to lose mass. Effectively they evaporate.

You'll note the math on that link is rather complex, but see the one example:

So, for instance, a 1-second-lived black hole has a mass of $2.28 \cdot 10^{5}\;\text{kg}$, equivalent to an energy of $2.05 \cdot 10^{22}\;\text{J}$ that could be released by $5 \cdot 10^{6}$ megatons of TNT. The initial power is $6.84 \cdot 10^{21}\;\text{W}$.

Which means if you feed $228$ metric tons into your black hole, it will only last one second.

Now, you might think that the black hole will be able to pull in matter and prevent itself from exploding. Unfortunately, look at how powerful that release is - it's effectively a huge explosion. The radiation outpouring is going to prevent any matter from making it in.

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  • $\begingroup$ Isn't that 228000 tons? $\endgroup$
    – Monty Wild ♦
    Mar 15, 2015 at 22:31
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    $\begingroup$ @MontyWild... actually I think it's only 22.8 metric tons (22,280 kg). I have no idea what I was doing with the original math... still fits into the "unreasonable for a weapon" though. $\endgroup$
    – Dan Smolinske
    Mar 16, 2015 at 0:32
  • $\begingroup$ 2.28 × 10^5 is 228000, not 22800. $\endgroup$
    – Monty Wild ♦
    Mar 16, 2015 at 2:35
  • $\begingroup$ What do you mean, "unreasonable for a weapon?" If you need a small moon to deliver a planet-busting payload of antimatter (the Death Star), millions of tons of neutronium doesn't seem out of the question. ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Dane
    Mar 21, 2015 at 13:56
  • $\begingroup$ While there are energy-based black holes (they've been made at the LHC), they have exceedingly short lives. Short enough to not even make it to the edge of the detection devices before they radiate away and they move at a significant percentage of the speed of light. $\endgroup$
    – Brad
    Mar 22, 2015 at 1:02
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No. Even at high energies, the black holes created by a particle accelerator will have event horizons far smaller than any standard particle, which means nothing will be drawn in. They will basically instantaneously evaporate/decay into a spray of other particles (the effects of Hawking radiation.)

Some more thoughts on this (warning, speculative science ahead):

If we consider the moment of impact between to high-energy particles travelling in opposite directions and the resulting spray of chemicals brought on by decomposition, we may indeed consider this to be the decay of an infinitesimally small "virtual" black hole with a mass of the energy in the combined two particle system.

A real black hole of that size wouldn't even be swallowing virtual particles and thus wouldn't really emit any radiation whatsoever. The final massive burst of radiation has to be the conversion that happens when the event horizon shrinks below the lower-bound radius for particle absorption.

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Other posts have shown that shooting black-holes isn't going to be viable option.

I have a different take on this. Good ol' lateral thinking makes me want to consider this;

Throw the whole black-hole launcher at the planet

This is more like a bomb than anything. Put the particle accelerators on the planet you want to wreck, power them up, smash particles together and sit back (well back) and enjoy the show.

However, this is only food for thought. As has been pointed out, even a small, short-lived, black hole is incredibly huge. Producing one on a planet is far easier than producing one in space, but that's not to say it's actually easy.

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