Miniature black holes are nowhere near as cool as their name suggests

In terms of cosmic terminology, you just can’t beat a black hole. The name conjures up dire, implacable threats. Coined by (maybe) John Wheeler in 1967, the name “black hole” is a masterpiece of branding. No other cosmological concept has gotten as much public attention (runner-up: The Big Bang).

I mean, I like a pulsar as much as the next guy — whether it’s a star, a watch, a toothbrush or a car — but there’s just no sense of universe-threatening dread with a pulsar.

But all you need is a single news story that the Large Hadron Collider will make microscopic black holes, and suddenly everyone’s got the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Well, good news everybody: microscopic black holes will not destroy our planet. Discovery.com points out that the smaller a black hole is, the slower it accumulates mass, and the faster it will evaporate away:

Once these speeding black holes pop out the other side of the Earth, they stop accreting mass (from the Earth’s interior) and are flung into space and evaporate as they radiate Hawking Radiation. But don’t worry about these welterweights punching a hole in the ground beneath you, on the entire trip through our planet, a single black hole will have swept up a meager 10^-22 kg of rock.

10^-22 kg is the mass of a hemoglobin molecule inside a red blood cell.

But say if the black hole isn’t very speedy and it drops like a stone into the Earth… and stays there?

The researchers point out that the slower the black hole, the less mass it accretes; so although it might pop out of the LHC and sink into our planet, it will suck up very little mass.

If a slow-moving micro-black hole set up home inside Earth and sat there for 13.7 billion years (the age of the Universe), it would weigh in at a puny 10^-18 kg (the mass of a virus).

As Slashdot puts it, “Unfortunately, if you’re a megalomaniac looking for your next globe-eating weapon, you can scrub MBHs off your WMD list.”

But nobody answers the real question: When the heck will someone step up and create a real Black Hole — I mean Black Hole 2: The Sequel!