When a Tiny Black Hole Passes Through You
Imagine this for a second: you’re going about your day, and a microscopic black hole – something far smaller than an atom but weighing billions of tons – zips straight through your body. It sounds like the premise of a sci-fi horror story, but a physicist actually sat down and worked out what would happen. And surprisingly, the result isn’t quite as apocalyptic as you might expect.
According to physicist Robert Scherrer of Vanderbilt University, the idea was inspired partly by renewed scientific interest in black holes and partly by an old science-fiction tale he remembered from the 1970s. In that story, someone dies because a black hole passes through them – so he wanted to check if such a scenario was even possible. After all, tiny “primordial” black holes have been proposed as one of the potential candidates for dark matter, those mysterious particles thought to make up about 27 percent of the Universe.
Also Read:These primordial black holes would have formed in the chaos just after the Big Bang, from regions where matter was incredibly dense. If they exist, they could be as light as a fraction of a paperclip or as massive as an asteroid. But because they would also be extremely small in physical size – far smaller than an atom – the big question is: would we even notice one passing through us?
Scherrer’s calculations suggest that below a certain mass, the answer is basically no. A tiny black hole whipping through your body at incredible speed wouldn’t interact much with your tissue. Instead, the real danger would come from the shock wave it generates. Much like a supersonic bullet, the black hole’s passage would force the surrounding flesh to violently compress and rebound, producing an effect similar to a ballistic wound. Yet even then, he found that a black hole weighing around 100 billion tons would still cause less tissue damage than a small-caliber .22 round.
Things get more dramatic only when the mass gets truly enormous – around 140 billion metric tons or more. Anything at that scale, though still only fractions of a picometer in diameter, would produce a shock wave strong enough to tear through flesh with serious force. And beyond shock waves, there’s another theoretical threat: tidal forces. A black hole’s gravity isn’t uniform, and the stretching effect could, in principle, rip delicate cells apart. But for that to happen to the human brain, the black hole would need to weigh in the trillions of tons. By that point, the shock wave alone would already be catastrophic.
But here’s the twist: although the physics is fascinating, the odds of such an encounter are practically zero. Even if primordial black holes make up some fraction of dark matter, Scherrer estimates that one passing through a human would be expected only once every quintillion years – far longer than the Universe has existed.
So while a sufficiently massive tiny black hole could act like a devastating cosmic bullet, it’s nothing anyone needs to lose sleep over. In fact, the most likely scenario is that if a microscopic primordial black hole ever crossed your path, you wouldn’t notice at all. Sleep tight!
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