Gasp; can it be... follow up?

So, I noticed a story, linked from Slashdot, which helps me with an earlier point: I believe I said that there isn't enough mass in the solar system to make a black hole. According to the article, the smallest known black hole is a mere 3.8 solar masses. So how does that compare to the mass, not only of our sun, but of our whole solar system? Do the planets make up 2.8 solar masses collectively?

No. No they don't.

Wikipedia tells me that Jupiter is 1/1000th of a solar mass, and that it is not only the largest planet, but also the heaviest. And there is a major dropoff in mass after that. The next biggie on the list, Saturn, is a mere 0.3 Jovian masses. But let's assume that every planet in the solar system was as heavy as Jupiter, and that, additionally, there were like 50 extra planets we just hadn't seen before, because scientists kept putting their thumbs over the camera lens or something. Here's the math on that one:

1 solar mass
+ (50 x 1/1000) solar masses
= 1.05 solar masses.

We're still a good 2.75 solar masses away from being the tiniest of black holes in the known universe.

This is, of course, not to say that there can't be a smaller black hole, but this newly discovered tiny black hole thing is almost four times the weight of our entire solar system, and is packed into a fifteen-mile sphere. The weight of the entire Earth would have to be packed into a pocket-sized volume to even approach that density.

Also, the danger of a black hole is that it has a massive gravitational field because it has, well, a lot of mass. These scientists at CERN aren't playing around with entire solar systems; hell- they aren't playing around with entire atoms. Worry not, good people of the earth: You'll have plenty of time to destroy the earth the conventional way before a black hole ever does us all in.