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There was once a Far Side cartoon in which a black hole had opened in someone's living room and was sucking the furniture, people, pets, etc to the middle of the room.

It was a funny picture, but could it happen? If a black hole is created anytime you squeeze matter sufficiently and black holes act like other masses with respect to gravity, couldn't a black hole be created in a lab somehow and continue to exist there? If so, what would happen over time? Would the whole planet necessarily be drawn in, or might the hole be kept stable?

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  • Possible duplicates: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/2743/2451 , http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/51700/2451 , http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/55143/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Jan 13 '15 at 15:05
  • I'm pretty confident the answer is somewhere in the dupe links Qmechanic posted, so I'll make this a comment. If the black hole didn't evaporate first, consider that any bit of matter coming in contact with its event horizon would become trapped and a part of the back hole. So unless it could be somehow isolated in a pure vacuum forever, it would continue to absorb anything it comes in contact with and would eventually devour the planet. – Jim Jan 13 '15 at 15:14
  • Black holes (BHs) are thought to evaporate, due to the so-called Hawking radiation. This process is extremely slow for normal BHs, but becomes faster, the smaller the BH is. For stellar mass BHs, they accrete more matter than they emit, while tiny BHs, such as the ones that were suspected to be possibly created in the LHC experiments, evaporate in a fraction of a second.

    In fact, to be able to grow faster than it evaporates, a BH must have a mass roughly that of the Moon, and that is probably too big to make in an Earth-based lab.

     – pela Jan 13 '15 at 15:48
  • (I wanted to post this as an answer, but just before I hit the button, the question was closed) – pela Jan 13 '15 at 15:49

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