From Newsgroup: sci.physics.research
The article "Gravitational effects of a small primordial black hole
passing through the human body" discusses just what it says,
apparently inspired by Larry Niven's "The Hole Man", where
a small back hole dropped through a person is used for murder.
The abstract of the article can be found at
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0218271825410032
[[Mod. note -- This article is open-source; a preprint can also be
found at <
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09734>
-- jt]]
The article concludes that the likelihood of such an event is so
low that it can be neglected.
Both in this story and in David Brin's "Earth", a black hole
drops into a planet (Mars and Earth, respectively), leading to
the planet potentially being destroyed because the black hole
slows down relative to the planet because of mass absorbtion and
resulting impulse transfer, leading to the eventual destruction
of the planet.
While this seems a plot device suitable for a science fiction context,
did anybody ever calculate what would actually happen in such a case?
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[[Mod. note --
Two other fictional treatments of this situation are
Thomas Wren
"The Doomsday Effect"
Baen Books, 1986, ISBN 978-0671655792
and
Donald D Clayton
"The Joshua Factor"
hc Texas Monthly Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0877190462
pb Bart Books, 1988, ISBN 978-1557850140
Clayton's novel is actually about slightly different situation, where
black hole is in the *Sun*, not in the Earth. (Clayton's name may be
familiar to some s.p.r readers, as the author of a well-known graduate
textbook on stellar nucleosynthesis.
There's a review of Clayton's novel in the July 1987 issue of
/Sky & Telescope/ magazine (page 44). Either the review or the book
(I forget which, and neither are readily accessible to me right now)
points to an research paper in the /Astrophysical Journal/ analyzing
this situation (assuming spherical symmetry), but I don't have the
citation handy.
-- jt]]
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