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Tiny Black Holes Could Lurk Inside Asteroids, Moons, or Even Planets Like Ours
(www.sciencealert.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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Astronomy
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Isn't an event horizon just a question of being dense enough to bend light past the point of no escape?
A hollow planet supporting a detached core with enough density to have an event horizon seems kinda ridiculous... If even light can't escape it, I don't see some rocky 'shell' withstanding that much gravity. Any hollow section would have collapsed well before reaching the point of the planet's densest point forming an event horizon.
What matters is the total mass of the black hole, not its density. If you replaced Earth's core with a black hole of the same mass, the gravity you'd feel at the surface (or beneath the surface) would be the same. You'd only notice a difference if you were in the hollow region formed by removing the core.
The way I see it, the real problem with a planet like Earth is that because the inside is so hot, the inner parts are too soft to support their own weight, and the crust is probably too fragile to support its own weight. That's not a problem, though, in an asteroid or a planet that's solid all the way through.
Depending on the mass of the black hole, the "shell" doesn't need to be a shell it could be effectively completely solid with an atom sized black hole at the centre.
PBH's as discussed in this article have pretty wild mass ranges, so anything is possible. It's entirely possible to have black holes so small they can't easily absorb new matter as they're smaller than protons. Tiny black holes only have large surface gravity, nothing noteworthy at a distance.