Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare. Listen on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast web page.
Dead Planets Society is again for season two, and our intrepid hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane are going after the hardest adversaries within the universe: black holes. These cosmic behemoths are so massive and so sturdy that they’ll devour just about something that’s thrown at them with out a lot as flinching – so is it even doable to destroy one?
Black holes are anticipated to evaporate on their very own thanks to Hawking radiation, a course of by which they emit a gradual leak of particles, however this might take for much longer than the age of the universe to occur naturally. Just ready isn’t actually an choice, so our hosts are joined by black hole astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick on the University of Kansas in an try to discover a quicker method.
Throwing something on the black hole gained’t actually assist both, whether or not it’s a planet made from TNT or clumps of antimatter – the black hole will simply swallow it up and get much more large.
That doesn’t imply it’s not possible to dream up one thing that might destroy a black hole by falling in. The escape velocity of a black hole – the velocity at which one would have to fly away from its centre to escape its gravitational affect – is quicker than the velocity of sunshine, so a ship that would journey past that bodily limitation would possibly have the opportunity to escape, or a bomb that would explode quicker than the velocity of sunshine would possibly have the opportunity to make a dent.
That is simply the start of the outlandish methods to doubtlessly wreck a black hole. Theoretical objects known as white holes would possibly work, however that would imply sending the black holes again in time, which wouldn’t be nice for the previous or the long run.
A black hole may maybe be stretched out, however whether or not that works is dependent upon the query of how quantum mechanics and common relativity mesh collectively, which would be the greatest unsolved query in physics. Our hosts discover that big magnets may assist, with doubtlessly horrifying outcomes.
Topics:
- black holes/
- Dead Planets Society