Thread by @AstroKatie

I know that “experimental astrophysics” & “experimental cosmology” typically refer to research using observatories or detectors for signals other than visible light to learn about the universe but it’s still fun to imagine they’re cooking up stars and black holes in the lab 👩🏼‍🔬🪐

https://twitter.com/scibry/status/1460021616398802946

Fusion researchers talk about "creating a star" in the lab (e.g., lasers.llnl.gov/education/how-…) but that's more like triggering the physics behind how stars work, which is not quite the same. Creating a black hole in the lab, though, might actually be possible angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq/black-hole…

If CERN *did* create a black hole in the lab, it would tell us some very interesting things about our Universe! It would confirm some speculative theories about the possibility of higher dimensions of space, and it would even give us hints about the stability of the Universe (!)

It would NOT be a threat to us, or to existence, though. If CERN's particle collisions created a tiny black hole (which would disappear immediately), that would tell us that the much more powerful cosmic ray particle collisions in space are creating them ALL THE TIME, harmlessly.

Anything CERN can do, the cosmos can do better. MUCH better. Cosmic rays that crash into Earth's atmosphere from space can carry a MILLION times more energy than the highest-energy collisions in the LHC. If those were dangerous, Earth would have been over billions of years ago.

(The reason this might be relevant to the stability of the cosmos is that it's been proposed that if tiny black holes could form in the cosmos, when they evaporate they could sort of... disturb the stability of the universe. If they form & we're still here, the cosmos is stable!)

So the logic is: if the LHC does manage to create tiny, short-lived black holes, it tells us (1) we have extra spatial dimensions 🤩 and (2) little black holes are popping off in the cosmos ALL THE TIME 💥 and (3) that's (probably) good news for the stability of the Universe 🙌