How much energy to “crush” the earth into a black hole?

Question by Mr SmoothHead: How much energy to “crush” the earth into a black hole?
To make it really hard, express it in “horse powers”

Just curious to see if anyone is smart enough and have enough time to calculate this.
How about in neutons?

Best answer:

Answer by Edward
What is really hard is to express energy in “horse powers” Power is rate of energy flow.

In order to even get a neutron star we would need a mass of about 1.4 the mass of our Sun (Chandrasekhar Limit).

The energy required to collapse to a neutron star
is

E= 0.5G M(R2-R1)/R2^2

Where
M – critical mass (1.4 that of our Sun)
G – universal gravitational constant
R1 – radius of a neutron star
R2 – Radius of the mass M

or approximately since R2>>R1

E= 0.5G M /R2
( Would be interested in buying a bridge instead?)

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2 Responses to “How much energy to “crush” the earth into a black hole?”

  1. scrap what i said before, was daydreaming… the earth would need to be 0.017 meters in diameter to become a blackhole it seems.

    so how much horsepower would it take to crush the earth into 0.017 meters?
    … but how about in joules?

    anways, i got as far as some of the data you need and got toally bored! sorry, might be back later, but probably not…
    Earth radius = 6378137 m
    Earths volume = 1.08685133 × 10^21 m^3
    Earths mass = 5.9736×10^24 kg
    Earths density = 5,515.3 kg/m

    To be a blackhole the earth need to become:
    radius = 0.0085 m (750369058.82 times smaller)
    volume = 2.57244078 × 10^-6 m
    mass = 5.9736×10^24 kg
    density = 2.322×10^30kg/m

  2. dont you know, its already been done, last year.
    i think i saw that on youtube.

    mcguyver did it with a pencil, a penny and 4.9422 * 10^63 electron volts, lol

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