How big must a black hole be to inflict serious injuries—or even death—when whooshing through a person’s body?
This odd cosmic question was ripped from the pages of a 1974 science-fiction story, “The Hole Man,” by author Larry Niven, in which a scientist visiting Mars kills his surly captain by unleashing a black hole from an alien device.
“I wanted to see if this would be possible,” said Robert Scherrer, a physicist at Vanderbilt University, in a statement.
Scherrer recently crunched the numbers, and suggested that the mass of this deadly black hole must have been roughly equivalent to the
This odd cosmic question was ripped from the pages of a 1974 science-fiction story, “The Hole Man,” by author Larry Niven, in which a scientist visiting Mars kills his surly captain by unleashing a black hole from an alien device.
“I wanted to see if this would be possible,” said Robert Scherrer, a physicist at Vanderbilt University, in a statement.
Scherrer recently crunched the numbers, and suggested that the mass of this deadly black hole must have been roughly equivalent to the
27 days ago
