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The cosmos may be dotted with black holes so small they could slip between atoms, suggests a wild new theory.
And we could be creating these teenage singularities all the time in the world’s biggest atom smasher, a new study finds. If we could craft these items, they could be a window into the mysterious nature of gravity.
Related: Photos: The world’s largest atom smasher
A size too small
We have four fundamental forces of nature (at least, which we know so far): electromagnetism, a powerful force, weak force and gravity. The four forces operate at different distances, have different carriers, and interact in different ways. They also have very different strengths.
And no matter how you cut it, gravity always comes out weakest. Gravity is such a weak force that if it were a trillion times stronger than it is now, it would still be the weakest force by a factor of about 10 million.
Go ahead and lift the device you’re reading on above your head. Congratulations. Your arm muscles have temporarily overcome the gravitational pull of the entire planet Earth.
Gravity is so ridiculously low that physicists have started to wonder why. After all, something so strange, strange, out of place practically demands an explanation.
Related to this oddly low gravity problem (known as the “hierarchy problem” in physics circles), there is another problem with how fundamental forces relate to each other.
At high energies, weak electromagnetic and nuclear forces merge into a single unified force (called, of course, the “electroweak” force). We have proof that at even higher energies the strong nuclear force also joins the unification party. And it is hypothesized that at extremely high energies, gravity also merges with other forces. But the energy required is so high that we could not hope to achieve it, even with a particle accelerator the size of our galaxy.
Why is gravity so weak, and why does it take so much energy to potentially merge it with other forces?
A deluge of darkness
The short version is we don’t know. One assumption is that there is more to the universe than it seems. Specifically, there are more spatial dimensions than the three known to us. In this view there are the usual up and down, left to right and front to back directions, plus… a few more. The exact number depends on the theory.
In this potential explanation for the weakness of gravity, the extra dimensions are so large that our universe is integrated into a much larger, larger dimensional mass made up of the extra dimensions.
In this story, gravity is actually very strong, but unlike other forces (which are constrained to our 3D universe), gravity moves freely between all dimensions. This dilutes the strength, making it appear woven.
In these models, since gravity is actually so strong, it would be possible to merge gravity at much lower energy levels. In other words, we might not need a galaxy-sized particle accelerator to see gravity join the unifying group. We might even need something much smaller. Like, say, the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer-long ring on the border of France and Switzerland, where protons are sent smashing into each other at almost lightning speed.
The game’s rules
How would the LHC spot these additional hidden dimensions? One solution would be to produce microscopic black holes. It normally requires an insane amount of density and pressure to form material that squeezes a black hole so that it collapses to a point of infinite density is not an easy trick. And if gravity is really as low as it looks, then we don’t have enough energy inside the LHC to make it happen.
Related: The biggest black hole discoveries
But if the force of gravity is actually much stronger, we could easily overwhelm the other forces of nature and produce black holes. If gravity is strong enough, we could already be making tiny black holes in the LHC right now.
These tiny black holes aren’t alarming – they would evaporate in less than 10 ^ minus 27 seconds, turning into a shower of particles long before they did anything interesting like swallow the earth. But to date, we haven’t seen any of the particle sprays suggesting microscopic black holes or extra dimensions.
But in an article accepted to be published in the journal Physical Review D and published in the preprint database arXiv, a team of theoretical physicists pointed out that something may be missing. Previous calculations on how often the LHC would create microscopic black holes made simple assumptions about how black holes would form and how they would interact with the universe around them.
The more precise calculations of this group reveal that, assuming all of these extra dimensions exist and gravity is secretly very powerful, the LHC can produce far fewer microscopic black holes than we previously realized. Depending on the number of hypothetical additional dimensions, the number of these ten-year-old black holes could be as low as a tenth of previous estimates.
This means that all hope is not lost in the search for additional dimensions and the potential hidden force of gravity. We may have to keep running the LHC longer before we can rule out these models.
And if a microscopic black hole made an appearance in our data, it would mean that what we think of as the universe is just a small bubble embedded in a much larger frame – and we should completely rewrite our understanding of gravity. .
Originally posted on Live Science.
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