Large Hadron Collider could create long-life black holes

People who feared that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create long-life black holes that will destroy the Earth might have a point after all.

Defenders of the LHC have said that if it creates any black holes they will only last a millisecond before collapsing.
However, three physicists have been looking at the maths and worked out that any Black Holes could last a bit longer than thought.

Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for more than a second. If they last that long, they could eat enough matter to grow bigger and stop themselves from decaying.

However, Casadio, Fabi and Harms think the black hole would lose out, and pass through the Earth or out of the atmosphere before it got to be a problem.

"While the growth of black holes to catastrophic size does not seem possible, it remains true that the expected decay times are much longer than is typically predicted by other models," the three state in a brief paper posted at the scientific discussion website ArXiv.org.

Uh oh...