post Wars vs Trek, Could the Empire destroy a BLACK HOLE?

[Solauren]

Okay, here's the premise.

The Empire finishes conquering the Star Trek galaxy, completely. They steam roll it, Death Star a few major planets for shits and giggles, and turn the Borg into a intergalactic junk sale.

The Emperor at the time is intrigued with all the various subspace and transporter technologies the Star Trek races had to develop since they lacked Hyperdrive, but is concerned about all the bugs in it. So he orders the major research firms in the Empire to get the bugs out of them.

So, after say 100 years of research, they do. Geodesic Folds, Wormhole creation, etc, etc, etc. All the one hit wonders of Star Trek are not standard Imperial technologies. <Which, if anything, makes them even more terrifying>

By this time, spread out beyond there galaxy, and backed by World Devestator technology and everything else, they have begun conquering the galactic cluster the Star Wars and Star Trek galaxies are a part of. The Kelvan Empire has fallen to them (reference: TOS, they controlled the Andromeda galaxy), and so has a few other galaxies.

Some imperial scout ships locate the next target galaxy, but there's a problem:
It's surrounded by a 200 light year think Dark Matter nebula forming a shell around it. (It varies in thickness from 5 light years think to 500 light years think in places). Dark Matter complete fucks up Hyperdrive and all the other major imperial technologies, as well as the subspace stuff they "liberated" from the Star Trek galaxy, and sending an invasion fleet moving through the nebula, even at near the speed of light, is just impractical.

However, the Empire finds a 'tunnel' in the Dark Matter nebula leading into the target galaxy. They send in a few thousand robotic Tie Defenders to check the place out (complete with advanced Droid brains that make R2-D2 look stupid), equipped with Tie Phantom cloaking devices, Phasing Cloaks, etc, etc.
Only about 40 make it back.

It seems at the end of the tunnel through the dark matter, there is a rather inconviently placed Black Hole. It's small as black holes go, with only 105% of the mass needed to be a black hole <which I believe is 3.8 solar masses>, but it's location almost completely blocks the tunnel 'exit'. <The Empire wonders if many the dark matter shell is artificial and this is the door, but that's not important>

The Emperor at the time is ready to say 'oh well, we'll come back to them later' until he goes over the sensor information from the 40 that made it back.

The civilization that lives in the target galaxy is rich and huge, but has a very small military, and it's firepower and speed levels are about the level Star Wars had during the time of Exar Kun and Naomi Sunrider. In other words, very easy pickings. They even appear to have technology that can turn Dark Matter into regular matter, and would let Imperial technologies function withink Dark Matter environments.

The only problem is the damn black hole.

So the Emperor orders the Imperial military to find a way to destroy it.
He figures the order of Super Weapons should go Planet, Star, Black hole anyway....

Because the majority of the Empire (the conquered galaxies) resources are being used to conquer other galaxies or keep themselves in line, they are limited to the industrical capacity of the home galaxy of the Empire. (in other words, the Star Wars galaxy). Even at that, they can only have the production capacity the Empire had around the time of the Battle of Endor

Now, here's the discussion part.

The Military comes up with two ways to try this. One is technobabblish, the other is not

Method 1-
Build several hundred ships the size of Executor (or bigger) that are basically giant Warp Field generators, and wrap the Black hole in a massive subspace field. This should decrease it's effective mass, and therefore gravity, to the point where it expands from being a black hole into a neutron star. Then use tractor beams, transporter beams, World Devestators and whatever else to mine of enough matter so without the subspace field, it will not become a black hole again.
Once it's not a black hole, they plan to blow it up with a Sun Crusher missile or something like Centerpoint Station

Method 2-
Manufacture enough anti-matter to be equal to 20% of the mass of the black hole, and using some kind of mass driver system, launch it all straight down the black hole at the speed of light as quickly as they can, hopefully destroying enough matter from the black hole to make it uncollapse on it's own.


Which method is the most likely to work? Could the Empire do either of these? Is this even possible?

And if either method worked, and you were a civilization that found out about it, and learned the Empire was coming to visit you, would you get out surrender papers ahead of time?

[Alan Bolte]

Well, I don't know too much about these things, but I don't know why you couldn't just annihilate the thing. They've certainly got enough antimatter, and though they haven't actually built such a weapon as far as I know, I don't see why they couldn't build a hyperCAM gun. After all, they'd have to have something like it in every hypermatter annihilation reactor, and I wouldn't put anything past a few trillion engineers and more or less infinite time.

[omegaLancer]

method two is a no go

dumping antimatter into a black hole will not harm it in the least. Even if matter and antimatter was to react and annihilate, the released energy would still contribute to producing the gravity of the hole.

Gravity is created by energy as well as mass so there is no hope to destroy the hole in that manner.

Method one sound like it may stand a chance

[SirNitram]

method two is a no go

dumping antimatter into a black hole will not harm it in the least. Even if matter and antimatter was to react and annihilate, the released energy would still contribute to producing the gravity of the hole.

Wrong. Black holes are constantly losing mass to antimatter. It's called Hawking Radiation; there's been some good descriptions of it here, try the archive forum.

[SWPIGWANG]

But energy is relased out of the black hole due to quantum effects in Hawkin's radiation. I don't think simply dumping anti-matter works.

[SirNitram]

But energy is relased out of the black hole due to quantum effects in Hawkin's radiation. I don't think simply dumping anti-matter works.

...No. The radiation is emitted because part of the black hole was annhilated and the energy was released.

[omegaLancer]

method two is a no go

dumping antimatter into a black hole will not harm it in the least. Even if matter and antimatter was to react and annihilate, the released energy would still contribute to producing the gravity of the hole.

Wrong. Black holes are constantly losing mass to antimatter. It's called Hawking Radiation; there's been some good descriptions of it here, try the archive forum.

Wrong Hawking radiation has nothing to do with antimatter, It basically due to the quantum fluctation at the border of an event horizon, due to the uncertainty of energy near the horizon of a black hole matter and antimatter pairs are constantly being created, most of the time the pair fall back into the black hole returning energy that was use in their creation.

But due to Quantum fluctation one of the pair can escape to freedom, in this case the blackhole losses energy with come from the energy of the gravity field of the blackhole.

Hawking radiation take the form of both matter and antimatter..

[SirNitram]

method two is a no go

dumping antimatter into a black hole will not harm it in the least. Even if matter and antimatter was to react and annihilate, the released energy would still contribute to producing the gravity of the hole.

Wrong. Black holes are constantly losing mass to antimatter. It's called Hawking Radiation; there's been some good descriptions of it here, try the archive forum.

Wrong Hawking radiation has nothing to do with antimatter<Snip>
Hawking radiation take the form of both matter and antimatter.

I'm gonna let this post speak for itself.

[omegaLancer]

Wrong. Black holes are constantly losing mass to antimatter. It's called Hawking Radiation; there's been some good descriptions of it here, try the archive forum.

Wrong Hawking radiation has nothing to do with antimatter<Snip>
Hawking radiation take the form of both matter and antimatter.

I'm gonna let this post speak for itself.

Why not look up the meaning of the word,
Hawking radiation
n.
A form of radiation believed to emanate from black holes, arising from the creation of pairs of subatomic particles in the space adjacent to the black hole, with one particle falling into the black hole and the other radiating away. The energy lost to such radiated particles is believed to cause the eventual disappearance of the black hole.

or for the more technical minded

Hawking radiation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Server will be down for maintenance on 2004-06-11 from about 18:00 to 18:30 UTC.
In astrophysics, Hawking radiation is thermal radiation emitted by black holes. It is named after British physicist Stephen Hawking who worked out the theoretical argument for its existence in 1975. Hawking's discovery became the first convincing insight in quantum gravity.

Black holes are sites of immense gravitational attraction into which surrounding matter is drawn by gravitational forces. It was originally thought that the gravitation was so powerful that nothing, not even radiation, could escape from the black hole, but Hawking theorized that (particle-antiparticle) radiation would be emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being "boosted" by the black hole's gravitation into becoming real particles. This would sap some of the black hole's energy, and so when these particles escape the black hole would lose a small amount of mass.

The radiation from a black hole is blackbody radiation with temperature:

where is the reduced Planck constant, c is the speed of light, k is the Boltzmann constant, G is the gravitational constant, and M is the mass of the black hole.

A black hole of one solar mass has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvin; in fact, such a black hole would absorb far more cosmic microwave background radiation than it emits. A black hole of 4.5 × 10²² kg (about the mass of the Moon) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits. Yet smaller primordial black holes would emit more than they absorb, and thereby lose mass.

[edit]
Black hole evaporation
The power emitted by a black hole in the form of Hawking radiation can easily be estimated for the simplest case of a nonrotating, non-charged Schwarzschild black hole of mass M. Wikipedia contains all the necessary ingredients: the formula for the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole, the Stefan-Boltzmann law of blackbody radiation, the above formula for the temperature of the radiation, and the formula for the surface area of a sphere (the black hole's event horizon). Combining all these formulae, the emitted power comes out as:
where is the reduced Planck constant, c is the speed of light, and G is the gravitational constant.
The power in the Hawking radiation from a solar mass black hole turns out to be a minuscule 10−28 watts. It is indeed an extremely good approximation to call such an object 'black'.

Under the assumption of an otherwise empty universe, so that no matter or cosmic microwave background radiation falls into the black hole, it is possible to calculate how long it will take for the black hole to evaporate. The black hole's mass is now a function M(t) of time t. Taking the time derivative of Einstein's famous equation E = Mc², we get
leading to
which, assuming then mass is M0 at time t = 0, has the solution


Finally, setting M(tev) = 0 we get the time it takes the black hole to evaporate:

For a black hole of one solar mass, we get an evaporation time of 1067 years—much longer than the current age of the universe. But for a black hole of 1011 kg, the evaporation time is about 3 billion years. This is why some astronomers are searching for signs of exploding primordial black holes.


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Anti matter matter annihilation has little to do with it..

[SWPIGWANG]

I think you mean 10^67 years on last part of the the last post right?

[omegaLancer]

you are correct, apparently cutting and pasting does weird things to number, but the point is the fact that antimatter would do nothing to a blackhole other than making it bigger and Hawking radiation is not due to antimatter, but due to quantum effect

[Metrion Cascade]

Method 1-
Build several hundred ships the size of Executor (or bigger) that are basically giant Warp Field generators, and wrap the Black hole in a massive subspace field. This should decrease it's effective mass, and therefore gravity, to the point where it expands from being a black hole into a neutron star. Then use tractor beams, transporter beams, World Devestators and whatever else to mine of enough matter so without the subspace field, it will not become a black hole again.
Once it's not a black hole, they plan to blow it up with a Sun Crusher missile or something like Centerpoint Station

Won't work (although it would be a neat way to make a planet explode). Mass lightening doesn't make things lighter in their own gravity because it's relative. A ship is mass lightened relative to normal space, not itself. That's why people still weigh something in the gravity of a mass lightened ship. They're also inside the field, so their mass relative to the ship is unaltered. Likewise the black hole's mass in its own gravity would be unaltered.

Although mass lightening it may make it possible to move the black hole.

And didn't Voyager go through a black hole?

[omegaLancer]

Is the black hole a Kerr or spinning blackhole? if so they may just be a way to get rid of it....

[hvb]

If conservation of charge is maintained in a black hole (so far as I know it is) a third, and simpler, solution in four phases is:

1) Pour positively charged matter, e.g. protons (Ionized interstellar Hydrogen), into the black hole in sufficient quantity. This can be done from the outside, so you don't have to try to surround the black hole or anything. Cart the electrons somewhere else (i.e. outside), to prevent the charge from attracting the black hole into the "doorway".

2) send a ship with a very powerful engine and a huge positive charge/electromagnet into the "dark matter" tunnel and let it advance slowly, accelerating the black hole by pushing against the coulomb potential. This will be slow, as the engine will in effect be accelerating a mass of ~4 Msol, but it will be effective and safe (if the charge is large enough).

3) as soon as the gap between tunnel end and black hole is big enough to provide a good safety margin (remember the 40 T/D got through both comming and going, so there is already some space, just not much of a manouver margin) let slip the dogs of war through said breach.

4) Enjoy the sports and the spoils of war.

[hvb]

If conservation of charge is maintained in a black hole (so far as I know it is) a third, and simpler, solution in four phases is:

1) Pour positively charged matter, e.g. protons (Ionized interstellar Hydrogen), into the black hole in sufficient quantity. This can be done from the outside, so you don't have to try to surround the black hole or anything. Cart the electrons somewhere else (i.e. outside), to prevent the charge from attracting the black hole into the "doorway".

2) send a ship with a very powerful engine and a huge positive charge/electromagnet into the "dark matter" tunnel and let it advance slowly, accelerating the black hole by pushing against the coulomb potential. This will be slow, as the engine will in effect be accelerating a mass of ~4 Msol, but it will be effective and safe (if the charge is large enough, i.e. is stronger then the gravitational pull between the black hole and the ship).

3) as soon as the gap between tunnel end and black hole is big enough to provide a good safety margin (remember the 40 T/D got through both comming and going, so there is already some space, just not much of a manouver margin) let slip the dogs of war through said breach.

4) Enjoy the sports and the spoils of war.

[hvb]

ups: no edit button.

I just edited phase 2) by appending:

( ... , i.e. is stronger then the gravitational pull between the black hole and the ship).

Sorry 'bout the triple post.

[Solauren]

Is the black hole a Kerr or spinning blackhole? if so they may just be a way to get rid of it....

Either one will do

[SirNitram]

you are correct, apparently cutting and pasting does weird things to number, but the point is the fact that antimatter would do nothing to a blackhole other than making it bigger and Hawking radiation is not due to antimatter, but due to quantum effect

You would be so much better equipped for this if you understood what this quantum effect was.

Particle pairs are little pairs of matter/antimatter particles that pop in and out of the existance in otherwise empty space. Happens every second, all over the Universe. Normally, they pop back out of existance without any problem.

The problem comes when a black hole captures one of them, often the antimatter particle, and loses a tiny bit of it's mass and the matter particle skirts off. Or the other way around.

If it wasn't due to the antimatter falling in and annihilating a bit(Thus throwing off lots of X-rays), you would have to find a reason for why the black hole shrinks when it's getting supplied with particles.

Christ, people think 'Quantum effect' is an explanation now?

[Prozac the Robert]

If the effect was due to anhiliation there would be no radiation because light cannot escape from the event horizon. Any radiation that we can detect caused by anhiliation is produced outside the black hole.

[The Nomad]

http://library.thinkquest.org/C007571/e ... nglish.htm

If one particle of a pair of virtual particles falls into a black hole and the other one doesn't they can't react back to energy and the escaping one becomes a real particle leaving behind a lack of energy in the vacuum. Somehow this "hole" in the vacuum energy has to be filled again - even in quantum physics the law of energy preservation can't be disobeyed for a longer time. So this "hole" draws energy from that black hole. But what kind of energy does a black hole without any spin or charge have? It's mass! Thus a black hole loses some of its mass after Einstein's famous formula E = mc².

Maybe you have noticed that that's no proof that the energy has to originate from the black hole. In fact we can't really prove it without a lot of quantum physics (It depends on the tunnel-effect). You just have to swallow it as being true. Another, yet similar, way to explain the black hole's loss of mass is that the particle that gets sucked into the black hole gains a negative mass and thus the mass of the black hole decreases...

In fact, the falling particle, wether matter or antimatter, acquires "negative energy" and thus lessens the mass of the black hole. This is explained in one of S. Hawking's books.

Which means that if real anti-matter particles ( unlike virtual pairs ) fall into the event horizon, without the need to react with a virtual "mate" to fullfil CoE, they will contribute to the mass of the black hole. No quantum tunnelling. Period. Prozac's right on this : any radiation created inside the BH by M/AM annihilation would never cross the event horizon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

Nowhere in both URLs is it written that the AM particle contributes especially to the BH losing mass : it is in fact a "trick" in order to observe CoE, and it works wether the falling particle is matter or antimatter.

[omegaLancer]

you are correct, apparently cutting and pasting does weird things to number, but the point is the fact that antimatter would do nothing to a blackhole other than making it bigger and Hawking radiation is not due to antimatter, but due to quantum effect

You would be so much better equipped for this if you understood what this quantum effect was.

Particle pairs are little pairs of matter/antimatter particles that pop in and out of the existance in otherwise empty space. Happens every second, all over the Universe. Normally, they pop back out of existance without any problem.

The problem comes when a black hole captures one of them, often the antimatter particle, and loses a tiny bit of it's mass and the matter particle skirts off. Or the other way around.

If it wasn't due to the antimatter falling in and annihilating a bit(Thus throwing off lots of X-rays), you would have to find a reason for why the black hole shrinks when it's getting supplied with particles.

Christ, people think 'Quantum effect' is an explanation now?

Christ you should not think that you know what you talking about, the Fact is the mass or energy lost by the black hole is due to the fact that the enegy borrow by the escape particle create a region of negative energy that actually drain energy from the gravity field of Blackhole. This process basically removes Mass energy from the black hole, no Xray or electromagnetic energy due to pair production is involve, and actually it not soley due to quantum effects, but a combination of thermal dynamic, relativitic and quantum affect that is responsible my dear sir.

You make the mistake to think that you actually know what you are talking about, If you pick up Steven Hawking Universe in a egg shell or any Proffessor Horn "Wormholes, and Black hole" book the process of Hawking radiation is explain. If you cannot take out time to Read either, just look up Hawking radiation with any search engine...

[omegaLancer]

If conservation of charge is maintained in a black hole (so far as I know it is) a third, and simpler, solution in four phases is:

1) Pour positively charged matter, e.g. protons (Ionized interstellar Hydrogen), into the black hole in sufficient quantity. This can be done from the outside, so you don't have to try to surround the black hole or anything. Cart the electrons somewhere else (i.e. outside), to prevent the charge from attracting the black hole into the "doorway".

2) send a ship with a very powerful engine and a huge positive charge/electromagnet into the "dark matter" tunnel and let it advance slowly, accelerating the black hole by pushing against the coulomb potential. This will be slow, as the engine will in effect be accelerating a mass of ~4 Msol, but it will be effective and safe (if the charge is large enough, i.e. is stronger then the gravitational pull between the black hole and the ship).

3) as soon as the gap between tunnel end and black hole is big enough to provide a good safety margin (remember the 40 T/D got through both comming and going, so there is already some space, just not much of a manouver margin) let slip the dogs of war through said breach.

4) Enjoy the sports and the spoils of war.

Excellent solution, I see a "Hero of the Empire" Medal being pin on you by the emperor Himself

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Can the Empire produce virtual particle pairs, then?

[The Nomad]

Can the Empire produce virtual particle pairs, then?

They occur naturally in what Pr Wheeler called the "quantum foam".

There is no reason to think the Empire could influence their natural occurence rate ( at least none that I can think of ). Although such a technology would obviously allow the Empire to hasten or slow the evaporation rate of a black hole, effectively destroying it in the first case.

[Solauren]

It wouldn't need to produce them, just dump loads of Anti-matter down them.