Nothing makes me happier than when brilliant, highly educated people waste their intelligence trying to figure out answers to stupid hypothetical questions.
For instance, if you ever wondered what would happen if a primordial black hole slammed into your body, never fear. Vanderbilt University physicist Robert Scherrer recently published a study attempting to answer that exact question that no one asked.
First off, primordial black holes only exist theoretically. So right off the bat, this is like trying to figure out how badly you would be mangled if you were bitten by Barney the Dinosaur. They are theoretical ancient relics possibly born within the first second after the Big Bang. Their masses range from a teeny tiny little speck to as dense as several suns crammed into a shot glass.
Some scientists even think they might make up dark matter, that stuff that makes up 85 percent of the universe, yet we can’t see it for s—t.
What Death by Primordial Black Hole Would Look Like, According to Scientists
If you’re wondering why he even thought of this in the first place, Scherrer had already researched how hypothetical chunks of dark matter might mangle the human body, so naturally, he shifted focus to a different type of cosmic horror ripping through human flesh. Oh, and because he read something like it in a science fiction short story he read back in the 1970s.
According to his paper, there are two ways a primordial black hole could wreck you: supersonic shock waves and tidal gravitational forces. The shock waves would behave like a bullet made of gravity, ripping through tissue and leaving behind a hole in you that would, frankly, look insane, since it would literally be tearing your cells apart as it passed through you.
Tidal forces, meanwhile, would stretch your cells unevenly. Your highly sensitive brain cells would handle it the worst.
If you’ve suddenly been filled with a whole new fear that you think you’re going to carry with you every day of your life for the rest of your life until it suddenly ends when a black hole bullet rips you apart, here’s the comforting part: this is never going to happen.
Scherrer stresses that primordial black holes might not exist at all — and even if they do, the density of ones big enough to actually injure you (asteroid-sized or larger) is so low that the odds of collision sit somewhere between “no” and “f—k no.”
The post Here’s What Dying in a Primordial Black Hole Would Actually Look Like appeared first on VICE.
