{"id":546,"date":"2008-07-28T00:06:07","date_gmt":"2008-07-28T05:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=546"},"modified":"2008-07-28T00:06:25","modified_gmt":"2008-07-28T05:06:25","slug":"why-small-black-holes-cannot-grow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=546","title":{"rendered":"Why small black holes cannot grow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the minimum quanta of energy that can be associated with a bit of energy.\u00a0 It&#8217;s about 10^-50 Joules, which ain&#8217;t much.<\/p>\n<p>That has important implications for black holes, says Scott Funkhouser, a physicist at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, in Charleston. As black holes accretes mass, its total energy increases but the energy per bit decreases,\u00a0 he says.<\/p>\n<p>And this decrease must always be greater than the minimum quanta of energy allowed by quantum mechanics. That only happens when black holes are bigger than 10^11 kg, which is only about a thousandth of the mass of Halley&#8217;s Comet.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s small on astrophysical\u00a0 terms. But it should also come as a relief to anybody worried about the possibility of the production of tiny black hole at particles accelerators such as the LHC. According to Funkhouser, these black holes must be safe because they cannot grow.<\/p>\n<p>Phew!<\/p>\n<p>Ref: <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.1938\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.1938<\/a>: The Minimum Mass of a Black Hole that is Capable of Accretion in a Universe with a Cosmological Constant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum mechanics places a fundamental limit on the minimum quanta of energy that can be associated with a bit of energy.\u00a0 It&#8217;s about 10^-50 Joules, which ain&#8217;t much. That has important implications for black holes, says Scott Funkhouser, a physicist at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, in Charleston. As black holes accretes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-seaside","category-sparks-n-thunderbolts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}