(NewsNation) — If you’re a space enthusiast, have you ever wondered what it would be like if a black hole shot through a person? Well, ask and you shall receive.
A black hole, clocking in at 100 billion tons, would do less damage than a 0.22-calibre round, according to Robert Scherrer, a physicist at Vanderbilt University.
“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.
Scherrer added a primordial black hole would generate a supersonic shock wave along its path, which would destroy tissue along the way.
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“As the PBH passes through the human body, it will exert strong tidal forces in its vicinity,” he said. “These will produce a tensile force on nearby human cells, and a sufficiently strong force would tear the cells apart. The cells most sensitive to this dissociation are likely to be those in the human brain.”
Now, what happens if a sufficiently large primordial black hole goes through the body? “It would cause serious injury or death if it passed through you. It would behave like a gunshot,” said Scherrer.
Tiny black holes represent a possible explanation for the strange dark matter that makes up excess gravity observed in the universe. Primordial black holes can be formed from extreme overdensities from the first moments after the Big Bang.
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