[Julian]

Julian asked the Naked Scientists:

Hi, my name is Julian from South Africa and I have two questions.

1. There is a law suit pending to stop the experiment that will recreate the first moments after the big bang using the large hadron collider. Is there any danger of creating a black hole that might consume the Earth?

2. How is it possible to view the Milky Way galaxy if we're in it, and it is
100 000 light years across?

What do you think?

[Soul Surfer]

If it did create a black hole it would have such a low mass that it would evaporate extremely quickly by hawking radiation and represent no risk.  Also interactions with cosmic ray particles at vastly higher energies than the LHC creates happen regularly and have not caused ant problems.

I have a picture of our galaxy in my wall just by me. It was issued by the Royal Astronomical Society some years ago and it has an almost three dimensional feel about it.  It is produced by creating a seamless montage of images of the entire sky and displaying it along the line represented by the milky way with the centre of the galaxy in the centre of the picture  It is important to remember that about half the picture represents looking out of the galaxy away from the centre