How fast do black holes consume matter?

Question

I have a bet with a friend of mine on how fast black holes consume matter

More specifically, the atom smasher in France/Switzerland, if it were to spark a black hole like there has been speculation over.

How fast would it consume the surrounding area

Is it instantaneously (a matter of seconds, or nanoseconds) or is it a slower process?

I tried searching online, but to no avail...

Can somebody point me toward an answer

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Extremely fast. Not even light escapes them, and they go in matters of seconds! Just Imagine droping a feather in one.

Answer 2

there wouldn't be an exact time, time is relative as you approach the event horizon time theoretically slows down. remember newtons law of gravitation the bigger the mass the greater the attraction between objects.

Answer 3

A black hole only consumes matter as fast as matter is fed to it (by gravity).

An energy black hole such as what maybe, perhaps the LHC could create has no mass, therefore no gravity.  Also, according to Hawking's theory, it should evaporate so fast that we will not be able to detect it.  Instead, we will have to guess as to whether there was one, by detecting the product of its evaporation.

And that will be tricky.

The particles that will be formed by the event (collision of accelerated particles) are determined by the energy of the collision. It comes specifically from the mass of the colliding particles and their speed.  Period.

Whether the energy becomes a black hole for a brief fraction of a second then is released as the black hole evaporates, does not change its "quantity".  It only changes the rate at which this energy turns into detectable particles.

The "delay" will be so short that it might be difficult to detect.

An energy black hole is formed when the temperature at a point reaches the Planck Temperature (the highest temperature that is understandable in physics).

141,679,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00... K

(there are 27 zeros after the 9)

In Fahrenheit, approx 255,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,... F

(there are 30 zeros after the second 5).

A black hole so hot will move rapidly.  It will also be extremely small.  It would be so small that it could pass inside a proton and not touch the quarks on its way through (but it would evaporate before going the entire diameter of the proton).  

It definitely would not be able to consume anything (even an electron would be much to big for it to "consume").  So, it would consume nothing.  Zilch, Zero, Nada.

Therefore, to answer your last question (how fast would it consume the surrounding area), the answer would be 'it would take infinitely longer than its expected lifetime'.

Answer 4

The short answer is that any subatomic size black hole would be unable to trap any matter at all, because it is to small to capture even one atom.

Black holes do not consume matter or suck in matter. That is just unscientific hype that fills the media.

Matter that falls onto a black hole is stuck there exactly like matter that falls to Earth from space (meteors) is stuck here. Would you say the Earth consumes meteors or sucks them in? Do you worry that eventually Earth will suck in the whole universe? No.

How about if we made the whole Earth into a black hole by compressing it down to a 10 foot ball. All the same jillions of tons of rock, but squeezed into a 10 foot wide ball. Don’t try to figure out how to do that. It probably can’t be done. But if it were done, Earth would really be a black hole. But it would actually suck in LESS matter, FEWER meteors, than it does now. That is because 4,000 miles from that black hole where the surface of the 8,000 mile wide Earth used to be, gravity from the black hole is the SAME as we feel on Earth right now. Gravity gets 4 times as strong at half the distance. That is in “inverse square law”. But the distance is to the center of mass, which for Earth is the middle of the core of the planet. If you dig a hole and go there, you end up with no gravity, weightless because all the ground above you is pulling you UP with its gravity while the ground still below you pulls the other way. IN the center, all the rock all around you pulling in different direction cancels out and you are weightless. But if you compress the Earth down to half its present size, and stand on that new surface twice as close to the center, gravity is 4 times stronger. Back up where the surface used to be, now 2,000 miles out in space, gravity is the same 1G as when that was the ground. It isn’t changed because Earth got compressed. If you keep making Earth smaller and smaller, but by compressing the rock as if it were foam rubber, not taking any away but just squeezing it smaller, then gravity gets higher ON THE SURFACE as the surface gets smaller. But satellites now orbiting Earth would still orbit just as before, because gravity for them is the same, only now they would be thousands of miles above the ground of the smaller planet. The amount of gravity is related only to the amount of mass in the 10 foot ball. A whole Earth in 10 feet is a black hole. A 500 pound rock in ball a millionth of an inch would be a black hole, but the gravity of that black hole would be no stronger than the gravity of a normal 500 pound rock. Unless you got within a millionth of an inch of the tiny black hole that is. At that close distance, it might pull an atom off the one part of you finger closest to it, but you wouldn’t even notice that. Now, any black hole made in a particle accelerator is going to be made from a few subatomic particles. Mass will be less than a millionth of an ounce. The gravity of such a small mass is impossibly weak, except at impossibly close distances. The distance is so small that it would be smaller than even a subatomic particle. And now it get strange (What not strange already you say?). At such small scales, things obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which are so strange even Einstein rejected them. These rules are pretty well proven because things like transistors were invented by use of quantum mechanics and how they work is only explainable by quantum mechanics. If these rules were wrong, computers wouldn’t work. But computers do work so we know quantum mechanics is right. And quantum mechanics says that tiny black hole cannot trap a single atom or even electron, because it can’t get the whole electron close enough to the black hole to trap it. One side of an electron could be close enough but the other side isn’t, and quantum mechanics says it has to trap the whole electron or nothing. So it gets nothing. It can’t grow at all. In fact, theory says black holes small enough, and these would definitely be small enough, will evaporate instead. They will LOOSE mass and not gain it. The reasons for that are quantum mechanical in nature, just too strange even for Einstein!

Now I don’t know enough about these theories in detail to be sure I got all this right. But the guys working on these particle accelerators do know enough. OK, so you don’t want to trust me or them because you don’t understand. Then you need to learn the science yourself and not just watch TV. This isn’t Star Trek where the Enterprise is always in danger of accidentally destroying the universe, or, more often, needed to prevent some other alien or natural disaster from destroying the whole universe. If that kind of thing really did happen every few years, like it does in Star Trek, then what is protecting us now from having our universe destroyed by a rip in space-time a thousand light years away, because we haven’t invented star ships yet to go there and fix it! So just get real. A particle accelerator canno

Answer 5

the speed of gravtiy...instantaniously.

Answer 6

It would take forever and no time at all (and all periods in between) simultaneously, depending on the reference.

Answer 7

One micro black hole, of the type that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will produce, will not be able to suck up the entire earth. For matter to get sucked into a black hole it must cross within the black hole's event horizon, and in the case of micro black holes their event horizons are extremely, extremely small. In fact they are so small that it is theorized that they will actually evaporate almost immediately after forming. But even if they don't, they won't be large enough to suck up anything more than a random stray particle or two.

The worry is that the LHC will produce millions of micro black holes, and that these micro black holes will gravitate towards the center of the earth. Where they will coalesce to form a black hole large enough to destroy the earth, but it would take billions and billions of micro black holes combined to have much of an effect. If you take an atom and compress it into a black hole, its gravitational pull does not increase, its gravitational pull remains practically nothing. Even if you have billions of them, their gravitational field would be miniscule.

Even if all the worst case scenarios are correct it would take millions of years to create a black hole large enough to suck up the entire earth.

Black holes don't suck up matter any faster than normal matter does. If our sun was compressed enough to make it a black hole, it wouldn't suck up any more matter than it does now. Earth would keep on orbiting the sun just like it does now.  Only matter that has the misfortune of crossing the black hole's event horizon is in peril, everything else is blissfully unaware that the black hole is even there.

Answer 8

Faster than light as light cant even escape