{"id":52576,"date":"2025-08-07T17:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T17:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/52576\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T17:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T17:57:07","slug":"daring-new-plan-lays-out-mission-to-a-black-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/52576\/","title":{"rendered":"Daring New Plan Lays Out Mission to a Black Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty-six years after Disney filmmakers imagined what it would be like for a spacecraft crew to journey to a black hole<\/a> in the 1979 movie <\/a>The Black Hole, an astrophysicist has released a plan for a real interstellar mission to go where no spacecraft has gone before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Outlined in a new paper published today in iScience<\/a>, the proposal is a two-pronged, surprisingly simple approach. First, scientists need to find a black hole that\u2019s relatively nearby. Second, they need to build something called a nanocraft\u2014a tiny probe that runs on a microchip\u2014sturdy enough to withstand the journey.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the appropriate technological advances, it could be doable within a few decades, Cosimo Bambi<\/a>, the paper\u2019s author and a theoretical physicist at Fudan University in China, told Gizmodo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea is \u201cvery speculative and extremely challenging,\u201d the paper states, although \u201cnot completely unrealistic.\u201d In addition to the proposal, Bambi presents a potential trajectory for the spacecraft, as well as an outline of what scientific experiments it could perform and how it might work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Searching for a nearby black hole isn\u2019t a new concept for astrophysicists by any means. If anything, scientists have been getting better at it every year<\/a>. And nanocrafts have also previously been touted as a next-generation spacecraft for exploring exoplanets\u2014some initiatives<\/a> have in the past received backing from major thought leaders in this space, including Stephen Hawking.<\/p>\n

\"PotentialA chart showing the potential location of a black hole near our solar system. Credit: NASA Goddard\/Adler\/U. Chicago\/Wesleyan <\/p>\n

Still, even if scientists managed to figure out the details, the mission could take up to 100 years, depending on where the target black hole is located. That\u2019s nothing in the general timescale of breakthroughs in astrophysics, Bambi said. Gravitational waves, for instance, took more than a century to confirm after they were first predicted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not something we can do tomorrow,\u201d Bambi said, adding that his approach could be proven wrong. But assuming scientists will want to directly probe a black hole someday\u2014a long-standing goal of astrophysics\u2014the discussions around how to do it need to start somewhere, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe proposed mission is indeed challenging, but not entirely impossible,\u201d said Honghui Liu<\/a>, an astrophysicist at the University of Tuebingen in Germany who was not involved with the work, in an email to Gizmodo. Liuechoes Bambi\u2019s argument that the proposal may be valuable in the future: \u201cSometimes we need to think boldly and do the calculations,\u201d Liu said.<\/p>\n

If\u2014and this is a supermassive if\u2014scientists are ever able to send a probe to a black hole, it would revolutionize our understanding of the universe<\/a>. For example, scientists have long suspected that the extreme conditions around a black hole<\/a> could reveal new information that contradicts general relativity, but current observation techniques make it hard to directly characterize the physical conditions of spacetime near a black hole.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCurrently, such tests are only possible in weak gravity regimes, such as within the solar system,\u201d Liu explained. Having a highly sensitive probe that can send signals back to Earth could offer much-desired \u201cclean\u201d data around a black hole, according to both Liu and Bambi. That is, if it can survive the gravitational pull of these objects, and not get ripped apart or eaten like every other piece of matter that comes too close\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifty-six years after Disney filmmakers imagined what it would be like for a spacecraft crew to journey to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[3508,2035,49,48,35677,66,306,35678,12449],"class_list":{"0":"post-52576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-astrophysics","9":"tag-black-holes","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-interstellar-probes","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-space","15":"tag-space-travel","16":"tag-theoretical-physics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}