These event horizons don't cause matter to disappear from the universe, but they might potentially create hawking radiation. The idea is to use a chain of SQUID devices to create a moving magnetic pulse that pushes along photons. Like salmon swimming up stream, if the pulses move along fast enough, the photons can not escape, except by quantum tunneling. This should produce hawking radiation the same way hawking radiation is, in theory, produced by the event horizion of a black hole.

Cool idea.

Original link

Online Fun

NASA is promoting a tournament to nominate the greatest NASA mission of all time.  My vote will be for the Mars rovers, of course.

The Moon

China has announced plans to land on the moon by 2013, and Obama has declared his support for a a return to the moon with a manned mission.

Mars

Images from MRO’s HiRISE imaging system have provided more clues of recent water activity in some gullies on mars.

Deep Space

Kepler has launched!  Hooray!  It’s just a matter of months (well maybe years) until we start finding M class planets around other stars.

And, speaking of M class planets, astronomers have discovered a binary black hole system.  Great place to work on your tan.  Some people prefer to tan with good old UV, but I like x-rays or even the occasional soft gamma ray when you can get’em.

There is also a fascinating new theory that, not only may there be life on the asteroid Ceres, but life may even have evolved on Ceres first and been transferred to the earth (during the late heavy bombardment)

Deep Space Report 2.3

Physicists Create BlackMax To Search For Dimensions In Space At The LHC

Looks like they are going to use the Large Hadron Collider to create a black hole simulator, with a goal of searching for extra dimensions of timespace predicted by string theory.  Yeah, nothing could go wrong with that.  The scientists at the LHC assure us this is perfectly safe

The CERN Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to begin operating tomorow. Kiss the world goodbye and prepare to be sucked into an 11 dimensional tear in the fabric of time and space!

Looks like they are still working on it, Better hurry!

But seriously, looks like they are planning a live webcast at 8:30 AM on 9/10. I'm not sure if that's GMT or LHC local time, but if you go there now there is a cool video

By the way, ever wonder where exactly the LHC is? It's here

Two astrophysicists have estimated the largest possible thing in the universe for there is an upward potential limit due to the age of the universe.

A black hole could conceivably have grown to the massive size of a hundred thousand tredagrams*, or 50 Billion suns in size.

Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses.  Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

That's a big twinky.

New Scientist article.

*note:  As an interesting aside, a tredagram is not even an officially recognized SI prefix of measurement in the metric system.  Merely a proposed prefix.  This number is sooooo large that we don't even have a clearly defined unit to express it.  Here is a pdf, wherein the the new unit of measure is discussed.