Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Mini Black Holes Could Form Gravitational Atoms - Technology Review

Mini Black Holes Could Form Gravitational Atoms - Technology Review: Normally, gravity is so weak that it can effectively be ignored at the scale of atoms. But that's not the case for mini black holes, which should generate forces capable of trapping atoms into orbit around them...

These objects must have a gravitational field powerful enough to attract objects such as neutral atoms into orbit around them. But they must also have a radius that is so small that the chances of the orbiting atom encountering the black hole is vanishingly small.
The VanDevenders say that this should be true for black holes with a mass significantly smaller than a few hundred billion kilograms. And they go on to give a detailed study of some of the properties of these gravitational atoms.

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