{"id":40681,"date":"2025-04-22T09:17:14","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T09:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/40681\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T09:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T09:17:14","slug":"we-could-one-day-power-a-galactic-civilization-with-spinning-black-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/40681\/","title":{"rendered":"We Could One Day Power a Galactic Civilization with Spinning Black Holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AI <\/a>AI-generated illustration.<\/p>\n

At the edge of science and imagination lies a question once posed by a Nobel laureate and now revisited with fresh eyes: could we one day power an interstellar civilization using the rotation of black holes?<\/p>\n

In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose proposed that advanced civilizations might someday harness the immense energy swirling around spinning black holes. Over half a century later, physicist Jorge Pinochet of the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences in Santiago, Chile, has dusted off Penrose\u2019s idea and given it new life.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIn principle, extraction is possible,\u201d Pinochet told science journalist Robert Lea from Space.com<\/a>, \u201cand it could be a clean and efficient solution to the complex energy problems we will likely face as a society in the distant future.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

His new paper doesn\u2019t describe an engineering blueprint. Any such technology is well beyond our current reach. Instead, it asks us to look beyond the limitations of our current world \u2014 to a far future where black holes may serve as cosmic dynamos. The first step is always daring to push the boundaries.<\/p>\n

Cosmic Spin Zones<\/p>\n

At first glance, the idea sounds fantastical, impossible even. Black holes are known for their ferocious gravity and impenetrable event horizons. They don\u2019t seem like natural partners for solar panels or power grids. You can\u2019t just strap a turbine on it.<\/p>\n

But something extraordinary happens around rotating black holes \u2014 also known as Kerr black holes \u2014 that separates them from the static variety.<\/p>\n

\u201cKerr black holes are capable of spinning at speeds close to the speed of light in a vacuum,\u201d Pinochet explained. \u201cNo other object in the universe could do this because centrifugal forces would tear it apart.\u201d<\/p>\n

As these black holes spin, they drag spacetime itself around with them \u2014 a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect<\/a>. This creates a swirling region outside the event horizon called the ergosphere, where anything \u2014 including light \u2014 is swept up in the rotation.<\/p>\n

In this bizarre region, objects gain kinetic motion by virtue of simply sitting in the space-time fabric betting pulled by the black hole. So, the idea is to harness this region for energy.<\/p>\n

Nature\u2019s Black Hole Batteries<\/p>\n

In deep space, nature has already found a way to tap into this energy. Look no further than quasars \u2014 the brilliant jets of radiation beaming from the centers of galaxies. These luminous beacons are powered by supermassive black holes, whose swirling disks of gas and dust heat to millions of degrees as they spiral inward.<\/p>\n

Some of that matter is devoured. But a portion is flung outward along the black hole\u2019s poles as relativistic jets, accelerated to nearly the speed of light. This also happens on a much smaller scale with microquasars, where an accretion disk of gas and dust surrounds a smaller black hole with a mass between 10 and 100 times that of the sun. <\/p>\n

The energy source behind both quasars and microquasars is the spin of the black hole itself. As they gradually give up this energy, they slow down \u2014 eventually becoming static, or what physicists call Schwarzschild black holes, defined only by their mass.<\/p>\n

A Particle Trick from the \u201860s<\/p>\n

Penrose\u2019s original idea wasn\u2019t about accretion disks, but rather about the ergosphere.<\/p>\n

Imagine a carousel spinning without a motor, just from inertia. A child hurls a ball at it, and the ball rebounds faster than it came in. In the process, the carousel slows down a bit \u2014 the extra energy in the ball supposedly coming from the carousel\u2019s rotation.<\/p>\n

Now replace the child with a highly advanced civilization. Instead of a ball, they launch a particle toward a spinning black hole. Part of that particle escapes \u2014 carrying more energy than it arrived with. The black hole slows, ever so slightly.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhat Penrose imagined is that we launch a particle against the direction of rotation of a black hole,\u201d Pinochet said in the interview with Space.com, \u201cand a fragment of this particle returns to us with greater energy than the initially launched particle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s all real physics. But it\u2019s also wildly impractical.<\/p>\n

Engineering the Impossible<\/p>\n

Today, we are not even a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale, which ranks civilizations by their energy usage. We\u2019ve yet to fully harness the energy of our own planet. Pinochet puts us at about 0.7.<\/p>\n

To access the power of microquasars, we\u2019d need to be Type II \u2014 able to exploit all the energy of our solar system. To tap into quasars, we\u2019d need to leap to Type III, capable of wielding the energy of an entire galaxy.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cPerhaps the greatest difficulty is that to extract energy from a rotating black hole, we need to have one of these objects close to us,\u201d Pinochet said. \u201cAs far as we know, there are no black holes in the solar system or its immediate vicinity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The closest known stellar-mass black hole, Gaia BH1, is 1,560 light-years away. The closest supermassive one<\/a>, Sagittarius A*, sits at the center of our galaxy \u2014 26,000 light-years from Earth. Unless we develop the ability for interstellar travel, black hole energy will remain a pipe dream.<\/p>\n

So, why bother studying something so out of reach?<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt is important for students to think about black holes and related topics because it contributes to their educational process,\u201d said Pinochet. \u201cIt whets their intellectual appetite, and it helps make them better scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He\u2019s using black holes as a springboard. His upcoming papers discuss phenomena such as Hawking radiation, which shows that black holes emit heat. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cPersonally, I study black holes and the universe for the intellectual pleasure it gives me, and because it instils a sense of profound humility in the face of the grandeur of the cosmos,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That may be the greatest energy of all: curiosity.<\/p>\n

The findings were reported in the preprint server arXiv<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI-generated illustration. At the edge of science and imagination lies a question once posed by a Nobel laureate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3845],"tags":[7021,35,74,70,23132,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-40681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-black-hole","9":"tag-energy","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-theoretical-physics","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114380868412331951","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}