Black Hole Power

[transhuman]

Hi everyone I'm sorry but I think I posted in the wrong forum! I'm not sure where this question should go but it's probably not an astronomy question

Hello all. I've been reading about Hawking Radiation. My interest is mainly in science fiction so please excuse the wild and wacky hypothetical question, but I'm wondering if it's valid or plausible.

 

My understanding is our ability to create high energy particles is continuing to increase every year, culminating with the Large Hadron Collider in recent history. Surely future particle accelerators will be able to create even more energetic particles, until one day we produce a collider so powerful it could potentially generate an honest to goodness black hole. However the black hole it makes would be so tiny that it would evaporate into Hawking Radiation almost instantly. But the accelerators will keep getting more powerful until we can form larger and larger black holes at will, and keep them fed with matter so they don't instantly collapse.

 

Imagine that scientists were one day able to create and sustain a micro-black hole by feeding it a constant stream of large amounts of matter. Who knows where they're getting the matter from, perhaps they built the black hole device in the middle of an asteroid field and have an army of space robots doing whatever prep work is necessary to the asteroids to make good food for the black hole. That's beside the point, the point is there's enough mass to keep the thing fed to the point it doesn't evaporate.

 

Now imagine they've built some kind of Dyson Sphere around the micro-black hole (which would obviously have to be larger than the event horizon of the black hole, and I'm guessing many many times larger), and are able to capture all of the Hawking Radiation that's burning off of the micro-black hole. Could equipment on the Dyson Sphere convert the Hawking Radiation back into usable energy?

 

And if all this isn't too Looney Tunes out there, if it all works, is this a valid example of a hypothetical matter to energy converter?

Edited October 25, 2011 by transhuman

[questionposter]

I'm pretty sure I'm explaining this right, but I might be getting this mixed up with something else.

 

Unfortunately, Hawking radiation is actually way way more complex than that, and that's only because it deals with virtual particles, which are sort of like particles than carry information, but don't entirely exist until they cause an effect and are measured. What scientists have much evidence for is these semi-existent "virtual particles" to appear in a positive and negative pair out of the nothingness of space for extremely brief periods of time, and then go back to not existing by running into each other, since positive plus negative equals neutral, or nothing. So what hawking radiation is, is when these virtual particles appear out of the nothingness of space, but they appear so close to the event horizon of the black hole that one particle's probability get's sucked in, so that the other particle can't annihilate itself with the other and go back to not existing at all, so the leftover particle that didn't get sucked in simply travels through space without something to annihilate with.

But, these virtual particle's still aren't "real" entirely, it's like trying to extract energy from a magnetic field. I mean a magnetic field can store energy, you can can't just take energy from it, and it's because it consists of these virtual particles that don't entirely exist in the sense that we know. If you know a bit of math beyond a basic level, they are like imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers can still have value, but they aren't real, even though they can be multiplied in ways to generate real numbers.

We can measure a gravitational field right? Well, we can measure those effects of virtual particle's, but the virtual particles themselves, are, well, virtual.

Edited October 25, 2011 by questionposter

[baric]

Also keep in mind that Hawking Radiation is so weak that you would never regain the energy required to create the black hole, redirect material to feed it, or even to build the Dyson sphere.

 

The real energy comes from the high energy x-rays generated as matter is ripped apart and gobbled up by the black hole. For that you wouldn't need a Dyson sphere since the energy is directed primarily along the axes of rotation.

[Moontanman]

I don't see anyway you could get more energy out of a black hole than you had to put into it to create it, if you had to feed it matter to keep it from evaporating wouldn't you be better off to use that matter for energy directly rather than feeding it to a black hole first? BTW a black hole with the mass of a mountain (more or less, if my memory serves me) would "evaporate" so much energy it would very nearly appear to be a continuous atomic explosion, a very unhealthy thing to be close to.... but I would have to think that with appropriate technology the energy could be harvested but think of the energy it would take to create such a object, almost certainly more than it would produce....

[Schrödinger's hat]

Also keep in mind that Hawking Radiation is so weak that you would never regain the energy required to create the black hole, redirect material to feed it, or even to build the Dyson sphere.

The rate of hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. So for a small enough black hole, you would have an acceptable rate of energy emission.

 

 

 

The real energy comes from the high energy x-rays generated as matter is ripped apart and gobbled up by the black hole. For that you wouldn't need a Dyson sphere since the energy is directed primarily along the axes of rotation.

 

 

I don't see anyway you could get more energy out of a black hole than you had to put into it to create it, if you had to feed it matter to keep it from evaporating wouldn't you be better off to use that matter for energy directly rather than feeding it to a black hole first?

 

You would have to have some way of containing the matter while you excited it to a state in which it would turn into energy. The only containment we know of that is strong enough to do this is a black hole (the process baric described above).

 

 

With regards to sustaining or creating a black hole, This would be pure science fiction. I'm not sure if we know of any principle around which a machine could be based that could do this.

[Appolinaria]

Also keep in mind that Hawking Radiation is so weak that you would never regain the energy required to create the black hole, redirect material to feed it, or even to build the Dyson sphere.

 

The real energy comes from the high energy x-rays generated as matter is ripped apart and gobbled up by the black hole. For that you wouldn't need a Dyson sphere since the energy is directed primarily along the axes of rotation.

 

 

 

Well maybe we're already doing this... the norway spiral kinda looks like a mini quasar.

 

 

$$ on whoever is sitting at the bottom of that blue trail.

[baric]

The rate of hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. So for a small enough black hole, you would have an acceptable rate of energy emission.

 

Yes, but this also presents a fundamental problem with Hawking Radiation as a power source... an inability to scale.