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Could we harness energy from black holes?:
A remarkable prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity -- the theory that connects space, time and gravity -- is that rotating black holes have enormous amounts of energy available to be tapped.
[...] [Now] physicists Luca Comisso of Columbia University and Felipe Asenjo of the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile have found a new way to extract energy from black holes by breaking and rejoining magnetic field lines near the event horizon, the point at which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole's gravitational pull.
"Black holes are commonly surrounded by a hot 'soup' of plasma particles that carry a magnetic field," said Comisso. "Our theory shows that when magnetic field lines disconnect and reconnect in just the right way, they can accelerate plasma particles to negative energies, and large amounts of black hole energy can be extracted."
The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded research results could allow astronomers to better estimate the spin of black holes and possibly discover a source of energy for the needs of an advanced civilization, Comisso said.
[...] "Thousands or millions of years from now, humanity might be able to survive around a black hole without harnessing energy from stars," Comisso said. "It is essentially a technological problem. If we look at the physics, there is nothing that prevents it."
Journal Reference:
Luca Comisso, Felipe A. Asenjo. Magnetic reconnection as a mechanism for energy extraction from rotating black holes, Physical Review D (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.103.023014)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 25 2021, @06:57AM (1 child)
so how do you get a hold of a tiny black hole?
I always thought it would be good to give it an electric charge and then you can literally get a handle on it... but it seems like it's a very dangerous thing to have around.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 25 2021, @03:01PM
Well, electro-magnetics and gravity are the ONLY forces that act at human scales (physical contact = electrostatic repulsion of electron clouds), so really your only options are giving it an electrostatic charge so you can manipulate it with charges and magnetic fields, or just relying on its mass, tugging it around using an outside mass as a "lure".
Either way, the big danger would be making sure nothing got too close - from an appreciable distance away (say, at the distance where the original surface had been), the gravitational effects will be no different than the original normal mass.