Starship Asterisk*

What if the Chelyabinsk meteoroid had been a mini black hole? Suppose it contained the same mass as the chunk of rock that hit Chelyabinsk, and suppose it had approached the Earth at the same speed and from the same direction as the surprise meteoroid. What would have happened when min black hole hit?

Maybe black holes with the mass of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid can't exist 13.798±0.037 billion years from the big bang. Let's assume, just for the sake of the argument, that it could, and did, and that it did hit the Earth.

What would have happened?

Ann

Let me guess. We would have seen a lot of Russians videotaping it - forever (at the edge of its event horizon) Just kidding. How about a gamma ray burst?

Ann wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

What if the Chelyabinsk meteoroid had been a mini black hole? Suppose it contained the same mass as the chunk of rock that hit Chelyabinsk, and suppose it had approached the Earth at the same speed and from the same direction as the surprise meteoroid. What would have happened when min black hole hit?

Maybe black holes with the mass of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid can't exist 13.798±0.037 years from the big bang. Let's assume, just for the sake of the argument, that it could, and did, and that it did hit the Earth.

What would have happened?

I'm not sure it would have even been detected. Maybe not even detectable with current technology. It would have been the size of a subatomic particle. I doubt it would have interacted with enough atmospheric molecules to create measurable heat or radiation during its few seconds of passage. It would simply drop into the Earth, and enter some sort of orbit below the surface.

That said, a black hole with the mass of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid is about 4 orders of magnitude too low to have survived from the Big Bang until now, according to current theory.