Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes

Abstract

We analyze macroscopic effects of TeV-scale black holes, such as could possibly be produced at the LHC, in what is regarded as an extremely hypothetical scenario in which they are stable and, if trapped inside Earth, begin to accrete matter. We examine a wide variety of TeV-scale gravity scenarios, basing the resulting accretion models on first-principles, basic, and well-tested physical laws. These scenarios fall into two classes, depending on whether accretion could have any macroscopic effect on the Earth at times shorter than the Sun's natural lifetime. We argue that cases with such effect at shorter times than the solar lifetime are ruled out, since in these scenarios black holes produced by cosmic rays impinging on much denser white dwarfs and neutron stars would then catalyze their decay on timescales incompatible with their known lifetimes. We also comment on relevant lifetimes for astronomical objects that capture primordial black holes. In short, this study finds no basis for concerns that TeV-scale black holes from the LHC could pose a risk to Earth on time scales shorter than the Earth's natural lifetime. Indeed, conservative arguments based on detailed calculations and the best-available scientific knowledge, including solid astronomical data, conclude, from multiple perspectives, that there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.

Version2: Minor corrections/fixed typos; updated references

References in corpus (12)

• Spectropolarimetric Survey of Hydrogen-rich White Dwarf Stars
• The high-energy collision of two black holes
• Black Holes and Quantum Gravity at the LHC
• Rotating Black Holes at Future Colliders. III. Determination of Black Hole Evolution
• Searching for a Correlation Between Cosmic-Ray Sources Above 10^{19} eV and Large-Scale Structure
• A theory of Cosmic Rays
• The Solar Neighborhood. XX. Discovery and Characterization of 21 New Nearby White Dwarf Systems
• High-energy black hole production
• Introduction to Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime and the Hawking Effect
• On the interpretation of the cosmic-ray anisotropy at ultra-high energies
• Composition of UHECR and the Pierre Auger Observatory Spectrum
• Hawking evaporation of cosmogenic black holes in TeV-gravity models

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions
• Stability of Lovelock Black Holes under Tensor Perturbations
• Possibility of Catastrophic Black Hole Growth in the Warped Brane-World Scenario at the LHC
• Exclusion of black hole disaster scenarios at the LHC
• Comments on claimed risk from metastable black holes
• Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes