The boldest ideas are those that often drive the greatest jumps in human knowledge. AND bold It is the best way to describe this study supported by the National Foundation of Natural Sciences of China. The objective: travel to the darkest secrets of the universe.
Short. A astrophysicist from Fudan University, in Shanghai, has designed a plan to send a micronave the size and weight of a clip to the black hole closest to the Earth. The propulsion method? A potent system of lasers fired from our planet.
Led by Cosimo Bambi, the exotic proposal intends Test the limits of Einstein’s relativity theory in one of the most extreme environments of the cosmos. Although technology to carry it out is not yet developed, advances in nanotechnology, laser propulsion and detection of black holes could come true in the coming decades.
A black hole to discover. The mission of reaching a black hole has two huge challenges. The first is to find a viable goal. The nearest black hole we know, Gaia-Bh1is 1,560 light years.
However, our cosmological models tell us that there could be a much closer black hole, “only” 20 or 25 light years of us. “There are new techniques to discover black holes”, Bambi says in a statement. “I think it is reasonable to expect that we can find a nearby one in the next decade.”
An odyssey of a century: Once the objective is located, the second challenge will be to get there. Current spacecraft, chemical propulsion, are too slow. The solution proposed by Bambi are nanonaves at a scale of a few grams that only contain a microchip and A solar candle 10 square meters.
A set of high -power lasers from Earth could point towards the candle, accelerating the ship to a third of the speed of light. Even at that rate, the trip to a black hole to 20 light years would last for about 70 years. The data to be collected would take another two decades to return to the earth, which places the total duration of the mission around 80 or 100 years.
Many reasons to try. If the mission is successful, the experiments that these probes can perform near the black hole would answer some of the deepest unsolved questions of modern physics. Is there really a horizon of events? You could try if the non -return border of a black hole behaves how the theories predict, observing the probe signal while falling towards it.
Is Einstein’s general relativity valid? Nanonave’s orbit would be used to detect any Minimum deviation of Kerr’s predictionswhich describes the spacetime around a black hole in rotation. Does the fundamental constants change? The mission could verify whether constants such as fine structure vary in such an intense gravitational field.
It would not be cheap. The plan is tremendously speculative. Only the laser system would cost around a billion euros. “It may sound really crazy and, in a sense, closer to science fiction,” admits Cosimo Bambi. However, milestones such as the detection of gravitational waves or the photograph of the shadow of a black hole also seemed impossible in its day.
Image | Event Horizon Telescope
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