The concept of a black hole evokes fear and terror. They can’t escape! They devour everything! Nothing comes out!
The accuracy of these beliefs ranges from debatable to inaccurate. Two physicists then calculated how the proverbial blood is squeezed out of a black hole stone. According to Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang of China’s Tianjin University, it is theoretically possible to use tiny black holes as power sources.
Their calculations showed that these ultra-dense objects could act as rechargeable batteries or nuclear reactors, providing energy on the order of a million tons. gigaelectronic volt.
In fact, the extracted energy does not come from within the black hole, but outside it, from the strongest known gravitational concentration in the universe.
It is believed that there are countless black holes in our universe, but it is not always easy to find them accurately. Our findings suggest that the masses of these mysterious objects range from about five times that of the Sun to tens of billions of solar masses.
But there is, at least in theory, another weight class of black holes. These are primordial black holes, which can be spatially small to subatomic size.
While stellar-mass black holes form from the collapse of the cores of massive dead stars, primordial black holes are thought to have formed from the overdensity of primordial plasma that filled the universe after the Big Bang.
We don’t know if primordial black holes exist, but if they do, it opens up many possibilities. One is dark matter, and primordial black holes are considered an attractive candidate.
Now it seems like we might somehow be able to exploit these virtual dimples in space-time.
Batteries convert non-electrical energy into electrical energy. Nuclear reactors use the power of nuclear reactions to generate energy. And small black holes could theoretically do both, Mai and Yang argue.
“Given the fact that black holes have such strong gravity, an interesting question arises: Is it possible, at least theoretically, to harness the gravity of a black hole to generate electrical energy? In other words, is it possible to use a black hole as a battery?” they write in a paper.
“In this paper, we make a theoretical case that Schwarzschild black holes can be used as rechargeable batteries.”
Now, very small black holes have a problem called Hawking radiation. This is the mass lost by a black hole due to the interaction between the black hole’s event horizon and its nearby quantum field. The smaller a black hole is, the faster it loses mass through Hawking radiation. If a black hole is small enough, it will completely evaporate relatively quickly.
Small black holes are expected to swallow matter very quickly, making it difficult to extract anything from the space around them.
Mai and Yang devised that primordial black holes above a certain mass could be refilled and recharged in such a way as to generate electrical energy.Atomic-sized black hole with mass less than 1015 and 1018 Once charged particles are replenished, even a kilogram should be able to produce this energy.
The researchers calculated that a black hole can convert up to 25 percent of its input mass into energy. This is 25% efficient.Most commercially available solar panels are highly efficient. less than 23 percent.
The research team also determined that black holes can achieve efficiencies similar to nuclear reactors. Their equations showed that 25 percent of the black hole’s mass is present in the vicinity of the primordial black hole. alpha particlesproduced by radioactive decay and can be converted into kinetic energy.
It’s not something you can really test. Even if we knew for sure that they were there, we could never just go and capture a primordial black hole and contain it and control it. However, this analysis provides some interesting food for thought.
In particular, the research team says that their black hole reactor model falls just within the mass range proposed for dark matter, potentially powering one of the most mysterious forms of matter in the universe to a refrigerator. This raises the interesting possibility that it could be used to supply
This research Physical Review Davailable in arXiv.