Could we shoot a voyager type of spacecraft into a black holes and see what happens?
In: Physics
Well theoretically we could generate a tiny black hole with a particle collider and chuck something at it.
Otherwise, like people said, you’re waiting millions of years.
Are all black holes in the universe just sucking everything into it? (I.e., photons, electrons, atoms, comets).
If yes: is there “less” matter in our universe because these things are sucking it in and depositing it elsewhere?
Our current knowledge of black holes is still very limited and we really want to learn more about them. By the time we can safely travel to a black hole, it’s very likely we will throw more than a few probes into it just to confirm what we know theoretically about them and hopefully learn new things from them. Black holes are truly weird!
You could throw it in, but you couldn’t see what happened. As soon as it crosses the event horizon, no light (or any signals it might be sending out) can come back out of it, so there’s no way to receive information from it
Given time is infinite,everything everywhere has already been thrown into a black hole. We’re just waiting for it to get there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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