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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn’t these black holes have evaporated by now?

Reasonable sized black holes evaporate extremely slowly. A black hole the mass of the moon would take 10^45 years to evaporate, so none would have evaporated yet in the lifetime of this universe which is about 1.4*10^10 years old. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation. Only black holes around 10^11 kilos or less will have evaporated by now. Couldn't think of any objects around that size to compare to, but there are some here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)

The radius of the biggest black hole that would have evaporated by now is about a femtometer, or the size of a proton.

Of course a black hole’s temperature is inversely proportional to its mass, so a tiny black hole would be terrifically hot. Ironically a much more massive black hole is undetectable unless it’s lensing something, or “feeding” on something. A small black hole would have a very high temperature just from Hawking radiation.

Aren‘t those the most energy dense objects known to us? Not sure how large the black holes in the ‚Kugelblitz‘ idea are, but supposedly if we could harvest the energy output of a significant fraction of the sun, we could manufacture them and then use it to travel to other stars rather easily... or destroy entire planets, as those two things unfortunately go hand in hand (in that regard Star Wars may be more realistic than other SciFi funnily enough).

Vehicles are too easily weaponized. The amount of energy it takes to move a human and a cabin is more than enough energy to destroy a small building. People have driven their cars into houses and businesses for as long as cars have existed. Not to mention aircraft. And driving cars into cars is a too common tragedy.

The odd part about Star Wars is the relative weakness of their weapons. Star Trek have "warp core breaches in a bottle" AKA the photon torpedo, which is much better at damaging starships than ramming.

So next question how does this account for the required spin? won't black holes that small would be spinning beyond what is possible through GR? can these black holes be just normal ones or would they be a "naked black hole/singularity"?

According to https://phys.org/news/2016-09-cold-black-holes.html a black-hole greater than the mass of the moon would have an apparent temperature less than that of the cosmic background radiation, so it wouldn't have started shrinking yet. And it'd be very hard to see. Temperature is inversely proportional to mass ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation ) so heavier black holes are even colder.

According to https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/ a moon-mass black hole would be as big as a grain of sand.

I don't know how far out LIGO can detect small-mass black-hole mergers, nor how likely these mergers would be. Nor do I know how detectable micro-lensing events would be.

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