What if a Tiny Black Hole Shot Through Your Body? A Physicist Did The Math : ScienceAlert

If you’ve ever wondered what would actually happen if a microscopic black hole tunneled straight through your body, answers have finally arrived.

And surprisingly, the damage would be pretty minor – at least below a certain mass. In fact, the worst of it would come from the shock wave as it tears through your flesh, much like the ballistic shock delivered by a bullet.

According to a new analysis by physicist Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University in the US, even a black hole clocking in at 100 billion tons would do less damage than a 0.22-caliber round.

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“Recent observations of gravitational radiation from black hole mergers, as well as new images of black holes, have revived interest in the subject of black holes in general,” Scherrer says.

They’re not a leading dark matter candidate because scientists think the conditions required to make them would have been rare, even in the turbulence that dominated the Universe at the time.

Some of these questions include how likely it is that one of these black holes would hit a person, how big it would have to be to do damage, and what that damage would look like – so Scherrer got to work performing calculations.

Here’s where it gets truly mind-boggling. The minimum mass for a primordial black hole to cause significant damage as it passes through your body is about 140 quadrillion grams – about 140 billion metric tons, around seven times heavier than the asteroid Toutatis.

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So, if a tiny black hole breezes through at a velocity of around 200 kilometers (124 miles) per second, it wouldn’t interact much with the tissue around it, Scherrer found.

However, that velocity is significantly faster than the speed of sound in dry air, and the supersonic shock generated in the black hole’s wake would tear into the flesh of the victim like the supersonic shock of a 0.22 bullet.

For a primordial black hole’s tidal forces to seriously damage your body, it needs to have a mass of at least 7 quintillion grams, or 7 trillion metric tons, to affect the most sensitive tissue in the human body: the brain.

That’s comparable to the mass of asteroid Iris.

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Only at this minimum threshold will the black hole’s gravity be massive enough to stretch and spaghettify your tissue on significantly damaging scales – by which point the supersonic wake has probably done enough damage on its own.

Either way, you’re probably not in for a good time. But it’s nowhere as bad as the black hole completely devouring you from the inside out, like they can eat stars.

Humanity probably won’t even be around long enough for such a collision to eventuate. It’s possible the Universe itself won’t even last that long.

“A sufficiently large primordial black hole, about the size of an asteroid or larger, would cause serious injury or death if it passed through you. It would behave like a gunshot.

“A smaller primordial black hole could pass through you, and you wouldn’t even notice it. However, the density of these black holes is so low that such an encounter is essentially never going to happen.”

Sleep tight!

The analysis has been published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D.