Fears that the Large Hadron Collider could create a black hole that destroy the world may be unfounded, but if we really wanted to make one, could we actually do it, asks Matthew Francis.

It was a scary thing that all the characters wanted to avoid.
It might come as a surprise, therefore, to find that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an “artificial” black hole in the lab. I would like to create a "/dev/null" directory (or a "blackhole" directory) such that any files written to it are not really written, but just disappear.I have an application that writes out large temporary files to a directory. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe. I have no control over the name of the files and I don't really care about the content of … The ring is brighter on one side because the black hole is rotating, and thus material on the side of the black hole turning toward Earth has its emission boosted by the Doppler effect. The LHC will not generate black holes in the cosmological sense. The existence of black holes has presented physicists with a conundrum, albeit an alluring one to attempt to resolve.

This image was the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out.

However, some theories suggest that the formation of tiny 'quantum' black holes may be possible.

Black holes may solve some of the mysteries of the universe.

In the 1979 movie The Black Hole, what went into the black hole didn't come out. The black hole is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun.