Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole Could Be Possible in 20 to 30 Years
Scientists believe the Milky Way could be home to as many as 100 million stellar-mass black holes, but much about these giant celestial phenomena remains a mystery. Now, an astronomer believes it may one day be possible to send a tiny spacecraft no heavier than a dime to the edges of a black hole in order to unlock its secrets and advance our understanding of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“It may sound really crazy, and in a sense closer to science fiction,” Cosimo Bambi, a professor of physics at Fudan University in China, said in a press release. “But people said we’d never detect gravitational waves because they’re too weak. We did — 100 years later. People thought we’d never observe the shadows of black holes. Now, 50 years later, we have images of two.”
A Mission to a Black Hole
At this stage, the concept is highly speculative, and there are substantive, possibly prohibitive, challenges to accomplishing this ambitious feat. Crucially, astronomers would need to identify a black hole much closer to Earth than any currently known to science. The mission would also require scientists to develop an extremely lightweight probe capable of making such a difficult journey.
To put it into perspective, the closest black hole we know of is 1,560 light-years from planet Earth. This is not to say there aren’t any closer that astronomers are yet to find — indeed, scientists recently found evidence of black holes in the Hyades star cluster just 150 light-years from Earth.
But even these are likely to be too far for a successful mission. Based on the number of normal stars and white dwarfs in the galaxy, Bambi believes there could be a black hole just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth — a distance that would make a mission from Earth more plausible. However, until a black hole is actually found, this is purely an estimate.
Read More: A Binary Star Neighbors Our Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole
Reaching for the Speed of Light
The second obstacle is the challenge of developing a spacecraft capable of withstanding the journey and traveling at the speeds necessary to reach its far-flung destination. In the paper, published in iScience, Bambi recommends using a nanocraft (a miniature spacecraft) composed of a space probe that contains a computer processor, thrusters, and solar panels, in addition to navigation and communication equipment. The nanocraft also features a sail measuring 10 square meters and weighing a gram.
He points to efforts underway to build nanocrafts that can move at rates of a fifth of the speed of light. According to Bambi, there are no known technical problems that would theoretically prevent these devices from reaching 90 percent of the speed of light. However, again, this is purely speculative for now.
If a black hole is located within 20 to 25 light-years from Earth and if engineers can develop nanocrafts that can achieve speeds a third of the speed of light, Bambi says it could be possible to reach the edges of a black hole in 60 to 75 years and collect data from that mission in another 20 to 25 years. In total, the mission would last 80 to 100 years.
The Ideal Laboratory
What would the benefits of such a mission be? Bambi describes black holes as “ideal laboratories” for testing general relativity in an area with strong gravitational fields. It would also enable astronomers to collect more information about the black holes themselves, from how the rules of physics are affected by black holes to what is happening at the event horizon.
As Bambi himself stated, the paper is “very speculative and extremely challenging,” but he believes that it is “not completely unrealistic” and the technology and knowledge required to carry out such an operation could be “available in the next 20 to 30 years.”
Read More: The Oldest Black Hole Could Wreak Havoc on a Faraway Galaxy
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