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WEEKLY NEWS 3: Black Hole in NY

Can you imagine anything darker than the night sky? The inside of a black hole is darker than anything else in the world because light cannot escape from inside of the black hole. It just disappears into the black hole’s darkness.

Scientists once believed that nothing could escape a black hole once it was sucked inside of it. Now we know that thermal radiation and heat can escape from a black hole. Scientists have been trying to figure out how black holes work for a long time, and they may have just created a mini-black hole in NY.

Scientists can separate elements into their basic parts. Many of these parts, like electrons, cannot be seen without a microscope. Sometimes scientists spin the basic parts to see how they behave. Scientists used a Realistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which is a huge machine that spins tiny pieces of parts, to experiment with gold. They broke down the gold into tiny parts called nuclei, then they spun the nuclei until they ran into each other. When the racing gold nuclei ran into each other, an amazing fireball formed.

The fireball was no ordinary fireball; it was hotter than the sun! The plasma in the fireball was 300 times hotter than the sun. The fireball was just like a black hole because it consumed the particles around it. Nothing could escape except heat, which is exactly what escapes from black holes. Scientists in NY are not completely sure if they were able to create a tiny black hole just like the ones found in space, but they are sure that such a tiny black hole would not cause any harm to the Earth.

--Written by Katheryn Troyer

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