11:07am UK, Thursday March 17, 2005

Don't panic but a black hole is far nearer than you may think.

Unitil now it would have taken a very long trip into outer space to see one but now scientists have created their very own black hole in a laboratory in New York.

180 black hole

Black hole in space

But thankfully it was not the sort that could consume the Earth

It lasted for atiny amount of time, a staggering 10 million billion billionths of a second.

The heat generated was 300 million times the temperature on the surface of the Sun.

Scientists used a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to shoot two beams of gold nuclei at each other at the speed of light.

The intense heat of the collision breaks down the nuclei into quarks and gluons, the most basic building blocks of all normal matter.

These particles then formed a ball of plasma which can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision, so creating a black hole.

Ed Shuryak, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York said: "It's very useful in that it will inspire thinking in that direction.

"But it's going to be another thng to see if it produces any fruit."