What if a small black hole devoured your body?

Some people may worry about being bitten by a snake or spider, but have you ever thought about what could happen if a small black hole tried to pass through your body?

At the end of last year, we learned that there may be mini black holes hidden, and that a black hole can pierce us at any time — but what (fortunately).

But what would happen if a black hole devoured our body? Recently, Robert Scherrerprofessor of physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published in International Journal of Modern Physics one that tries to answer that question.

Scherrer set out to discover what would be the gravitational effects if a primordial black hole passed through the human body, thus helping scientists to better understand the properties of dark matter.

Os primordial black holes are hypothetical black holes that formed at the beginning of the universe, possibly in the first second after the Big Bang. They can have masses ranging from 100,000 times less than a paper clip to 100,000 times more than the Sun.

Some researchers believe that these black holes may be part of, or even the entirety of the universe’s dark matter.

In his article, Scherrer analyzed the minimum size that a primordial black hole would have to have to cause significant harm to a person. Knowing this information can then help determine the properties of this type of dark matter, such as its mass.

The article is based on a previous study by Scherrer, carried out in collaboration with Jagjit Singh Sidhu e Glenn Starkmanda Case Western Reserve University, em Cleveland, Ohio.

This study addressed the so-called MACROs (macroscopic dark matter), which constitute a vast class of hypothetical dark matterlarge and composed of many particles.

“I knew I could use some of these calculations to study primordial black holes. Recent observations of gravitational radiation resulting from the merger of black holes, as well as new images of black holes, have rekindled interest in the topic”, explains Scherrer in one from U. Vanderbilt.

“Furthermore, I remembered reading, in the 70s, a science fiction tale in which someone dies because a black hole passes through his bodyand I wanted to see if this would be possible.”

Scherrer analyzed two potential gravitational effects caused by the possible passage of a primordial black hole through the human body: supersonic shock waves e tidal gravitational forces.

A supersonic shock wave forms when an object moves faster than the speed of sound, creating a powerful disturbance cone-shaped. When passing through the human body, a primordial black hole would generate these shock waves along its path, destroying human tissue along the way, so similar to the impact of a bullet.

The black hole would also produce tidal gravitational forces — that is, the difference in the intensity of gravity between two points. This impact would create a tensile force, which pulls and stretches materials. This intense force would tear human cells, the most sensitive to this effect being the brain cells.

While these findings may help scientists determine the mass of primordial black holes as dark matter, should we be worried, and add death by primordial black hole to our list of fears?

“Primordial black holes are theoretically possiblebut in practice they can doesn’t even exist“says Scherrer.

“A sufficiently large primordial black hole, with dimensions similar to an asteroid or greater, would cause serious injury or death if it passed through your body. It would behave like a gunshot”, explains the physicist.

“Already, a smaller primordial black hole could pass through your body without didn’t even realize. However, the density of these black holes is so low that such an encounter is, in practice, impossible to happen“.

Ready. What we have to worry about are snakes and spiders…