Black hole created on Earth; Romulans expected shortly

Posted on 18-10-2009

If you're waiting to exact revenge on your ancestors you time might just be coming! Scientists over at CERN have succeeded in creating a black hole here on Earth!

Well, kinda. What they have managed to do is mimic the curvature of space time that exists around a black hole. This "black hole" which works for light of microwave frequencies mimics the the nature of black holes to trap light.

A black hole is essentially a mass which is so large and condensed, and with such a large gravitational pull that its escape velocity exceeds the speed of light! For Earth, the escape velocity is around 11km/second, as such any object moving faster than this speed will be able to escape the pull of Earth and will end up in space. In a black hole, the gravitation pull is large enough, that light, even at the speed of 299792458km/second is too slow to escape, and ends up in trapped in the black hole.

Don't expect a commercial time machine, or portals to alternate universes any time soon. The application of these pseudo-black-holes is in creating better and more efficient solar panels, a little exciting, but with some great practical applications. The device would "suck" all light around it essentially curving and warping light around the device and feed it to a solar cell at the core.

Even though the device can only work with microwaves right now, to make it work with visible light will be much more complicated due to the smaller wavelength of visible light and requiring much more fine manufacturing of the device's structure.

How cool would it be to have a black hole powered laptop computer! What's left now but to wait for those anti-gravity drives. I hope we didn't upset the Romulans!