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posted by martyb on Saturday March 16 2019, @07:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the first,-assume-a-spherical-cow... dept.

https://m.phys.org/news/2019-03-black-holes-conquer-space-halo.html

A lot of hopes currently hinge on the use of directed energy and lightsails to push tiny spacecraft to relativistic speeds. But what if there was a way to make larger spacecraft fast enough to conduct interstellar voyages? According to Prof. David Kipping, the leader of Columbia University's Cool Worlds lab, future spacecraft could rely on a halo drive, which uses the gravitational force of a black hole to reach incredible speeds.

Prof. Kipping described this concept in a recent study that appeared online (the preprint is also available on the Cool Worlds website). In it, Kipping addressed one of the greatest challenges posed by space exploration, which is the sheer amount of time and energy it would take to send a spacecraft on a mission to explore beyond our solar system.

[...] "So the binary black hole is really a couple of giant mirrors circling around one another at potentially high velocity. The halo drive exploits this by bouncing photons off the "mirror" as the mirror approaches you, the photons bounce back, pushing you along, but also steal some of the energy from the black hole binary itself (think about how a ping pong ball thrown against a moving wall would come back faster). Using this setup, one can harvest the binary black hole energy for propulsion."

How to travel to, create, capture, and/or contain orbiting black hole binaries is left as an exercise for the reader.


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @08:08PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 16 2019, @08:08PM (#815566)

    Are the photons just getting blueshifted or is something more exotic happening?

    PS: The cool worlds lab studies "extrasolar planetary systems with a particular focus on the detection and analysis of worlds found at longer orbital periods."

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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:44PM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday March 16 2019, @09:44PM (#815582) Journal

    They're getting seriously blueshifted. Then they reflect back from the ship's sail redshifted and repeat.