An artist's rendering of a black hole. (Photo courtesy of BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash)
An astrophysicist has proposed a bold plan for how humanity could explore extreme physics in black holes by sending a spacecraft no bigger than a paper clip to the nearest one.
As part of this plan, a spacecraft weighing no more than one gram and accelerated to a third of the speed of light by lasers on Earth would collect data on the nearest rupture of space-time over the next century.
The project, published August 7 in the journal iScience and developed by astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, raises many questions: the most significant is that it relies on technology that doesn’t yet exist and assumes that the black hole is close enough to Earth (which it is not). Still, Bambi stresses that his plan is still worth considering.
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Sourse: www.livescience.com