Could we shoot a voyager type of spacecraft into a black holes and see what happens?
In: Physics
Conceptually, in the sense that nothing intrinsic to physics would prevent it, we could send a probe into a black hole.
Unfortunately the nearest black hole is about 1560 light years away from Earth. The fastest probe leaving our solar system ever launched (Voyager 1) is only going about 38,210 mph. That means it would take approximately 27.4 million years for a probe at that speed to reach said black hole. Not only would it not be working at that point but there almost certainly wouldn’t be anyone waiting to watch either. They wouldn’t be humans anyway so I guess “We” couldn’t watch even if we did manage to get it to go in eventually.
There also wouldn’t be much point to doing so. We can already see what happens when matter falls into black holes and that is about all we would get out of a probe, working or not. Once the probe passes beyond the event horizon we wouldn’t be able to get any signal from the probe even in theory, and conditions near the black hole would be extreme enough to rip anything apart. It isn’t a matter of “build it strong”, it is so extreme that things like protons and electrons would be stretched into spaghetti.
sure we could throw one there
the problem is there isn’t one near us, that’s one
two, we can already conduct an experiment here on earth that can fairly closely simulate what will happen
you take a voyager and a hammer – smack it repeatedly
voyager works -> wojager brok now wut do?
that’s about the extent of info we could gather
The problem with throwing stuff into a black hole is that the closest known one is more than 1500 light years away. Voyagers 1 highest speed is 61,500 km/h, meaning it would take Voyager 1 about 17,550 years to travel a single light year and 26 million years to travel to the nearest black hole at that speed and it would then take another millennia and a half to ‘see’ the results here on earth.
So yes, you can totally shoot a probe into the general direction of a black hole, but there won’t be anyone around to see what happens.
We can ‘see’ or at least perceive the results of stuff falling into black holes though and have no reason to assume that a man made probe would be any different.
Even if it were practically possible (the practical challenges with how far away the nearest black holes are were outlined in other replies), such an experiment would tell us little that we don’t already know, and mostly would allow us to confirm the predictions of General Relativity for the physics outside of the event horizon, which we can already probe in a less controlled way by just watching stuff fall in from afar.
It is unfortunately impossible, given our current theories, to probe the inside of the event horizon and all the interesting physics that we do not know about that might be going on inside there, like quantum gravitational effects. This is because even if you can throw a probe in, no signal from the probe can ever come out, so you cannot gather any data.
Sending a probe into a black hole would be the equivalent of dropping an old video recorder down a mineshaft without a rope attached. All you’d learn is what your recorder looks like as it disappears into blackness. We would need a way to send and receive data from inside a black hole to make it worthwhile.
Yeah, we could definitely throw a probe into a black hole and see what happens.
Up until it crosses the event horizon. After that point nothing can move fast enough, including light, to escape. At that point there is no way we could learn anything more from the probe because there is no signal in the universe that could cross that boundary separating us and it.
Practically, no, because it already takes light about 1500 years to reach the closest BH.
Theoretically, no, because anything that passes the event horizon will disintegrate. The definition of that singularity is that every particle, including the photons particles use to interact, that passes the threshold will have the same future, bar none. Your probe will cease to be and every bit of it will end up in the same place and time as every other bit in there.
Theoretically, and as has been demonstrated, the gravitational field of the black hole causes time dilation to the point where the probe will happily travel towards the event horizon as it had been doing from the start, but every inch closer it gets, the longer it takes _for us_ to see any light come back from it. Even if the probe didn’t pass the horizon, but simply slung around the BH and came back, depending on the distance to the horizon, it could well be that it would take that probe an hour to do so, while we’d be waiting for decades.
So in every sense, no, we couldn’t.
Yes, with some big caveats
1: Location: Black Holes that we know about are fucking bullshit far away. Far enough away that even if we tried to shoot for one now, every single person alive would be dead a thousand times over before it got there.
2: Speed: So, here’s a fun counterintuitive fact about space. It’s harder to shoot something into the sun than it is to shoot it out of the solar system. When you shoot something towards the sun, all of the velocity running parallel to any massive object has to be bled off through propulsion, otherwise you just enter into an orbit instead of falling in. The closer you get the more those forces are magnified so you really do need to get to to zero. This is equally true with a black hole.
3: We can’t get anything out of it: So, the whole thing about a black hole is they are so dense that nothing can escape it. If we shot a probe into one, even assuming that it could withstand the gravitational forces ripping it into a strand of molecules, once it falls out nothing the signal was sending would be able to escape the event horizon, meaning we couldn’t get the information.
1. Too far away. We didn’t even reach another Star.
2. Black Holes are too “strong”. We do not have the knowledge of building something that could withstand the “shredding power” of a black hole.
3. Information can’t really leave the black hole. If it does with some god-given miracle, it will probably be useless to us . So we can just observe what happens on the ‘outside’
4. We roughly already know what happens when something goes near a Black hole.
There is really no use in trying right now. But let’s say there would be a Black Hole near us, that couldn’t harm us – you could throw anything inside I guess, You would see what happenes to it. But that’s it.
Given time is infinite,everything everywhere has already been thrown into a black hole. We’re just waiting for it to get there.
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