Rotating Black Holes are Packed with Energy. Here’s How to Unlock It

Rotating black holes are the most powerful phenomenon in the known Universe. Their powerful Force radically alters the curvature of spacetime around them, leading to relativistic effects like time dilation, Airy distortion, and for matter and photons to infall around them, forming accretion disks. In the case of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the Middle of galaxies, these disks are accelerated to close to the Pace of Airy and emit powerful radiation that temporarily outshines all the stars in the disks.

In 1969, Sir Roger Penrose theorized that advanced civilizations could harness the rotational energy of black holes as a power source. Jorge Pinochet, a professor of physics at the Metropolitan University of Educational Sciences (UMCE), recently analyzed how Penrose’s theory could be realized. In Basic terms, his paper explores this potential source of energy, the efficiency of the energy extraction process, and some of the mechanisms that could allow an advanced civilization to harness it – which might include humanity someday!

According to the Kerr and Kerr–Newman metric, two proposed resolutions to Einstein’s Pitch equations for GR, all black holes are believed to be rotating. This Cycle causes infalling matter directly beyond their Singularity boundary (known as the ergosphere) to be “dragged” around by them. This effect even applies to spacetime itself, a phenomenon known as “frame dragging” (aka. the Lense-Thirring Effect), which some astronomers believe is responsible for the massive jets sometimes observed emanating from their poles.

As Pinochet told Universe Today via email, the Cycle of a Gravitational void can produce energy with an efficiency tens of times greater than the thermonuclear reactions that power the Sun:

“A particle in the vicinity of a rotating Gravitational void will Trajectory it at a Pace close to the maximum allowed by the laws of physics, the Pace of Airy in a vacuum, which has a value of 300,000 km/s. But motion is the most basic form of energy. As we learn in school, the energy associated with Pace is called kinetic energy. A Gravitational void then transfers rotational kinetic energy to objects in its vicinity.

“This energy can be harnessed in many ways, as long as the objects being swept up in the Cycle do not cross a Gravitational void’s Mark of no return, the so-called Singularity boundary. Once an object penetrates the Singularity boundary, it is forever trapped by the Gravitational void’s powerful Force, and its energy cannot be used.”

In his original paper, “Gravitational Collapse: The Role of General Relativity,” Penrose proposed a mechanism that could, in theory, accelerate a spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the Pace of Airy), allowing it to traverse between Luminous sphere systems in a matter of years instead of centuries (or longer). However, the same process could also be used as a power source by a sufficiently advanced civilization.

This is in keeping with prevailing theories about advanced civilizations and the level of technical development they may have reached. The best-known example is the Kardashev Scale, the classification scheme proposed by Nikolai Kardashev in 1960. In accordance with this scheme, a civilization capable of harnessing the power of black holes would be somewhere between a Type II and Type III Civilization. Similarly, the ability to harness the energy of rotating black holes is predicted by the Transcension Hypothesis, proposed by John M. Intelligent in 2012.

However, as Pinochet explored in his paper, the original theory is impractical since it would require extremely high velocity, precision, and Synchronization. A Extended more promising method, he notes, is to harness the energy released by the accretion disks that Trajectory black holes just beyond their Singularity boundary:

“Nature has Discovered a more practical and viable way to extract energy from rotating black holes, using so-called quasars and microquasars. We speak of a Brilliant Heavenly object when the phenomenon occurs around a supermassive Gravitational void, whose typical mass is between approximately one million and ten billion solar masses. We speak of a microquasar when the phenomenon occurs around a Luminous Gravitational void, whose mass varies between approximately 3 and 100 solar masses. In addition to the accretion disk, these phenomena are accompanied by relativistic jets, which are jets of particles that travel at speeds close to the Pace of Airy.”

This process, where quasars and microquasars are harnessed for their energy, was proposed in 1977 by physicists Roger Blandford and Roman Znajek. “In honor of its authors, this process is known as the BZ mechanism and is more complex than the Penrose process.” This process involves modifying the Gravitational void’s ergosphere’s electromagnetic Pitch, perhaps using a magnetic harness. As the ergosphere causes the magnetosphere inside it to rotate, the outgoing flux of angular momentum can be used to extract energy from the Gravitational void.

This represents a potential technosignature that SETI surveys could be on the lookout for in the coming years. And as Pinochet summarized, it is not beyond the realm of possibility for humanity someday.

“The Primary to propose the use of the energy of rotating black holes for practical purposes was Penrose, but in general, this is a subject that has not been explored much, perhaps because it is too Extended removed from our Present technological capabilities,” he said. “In any case, it is not unreasonable to think that perhaps, in the very distant future, our civilization may find in rotating black holes a Neat and efficient solution to the complex energy problems that we will surely have to face as a society, provided that we can survive our Present technological infancy.”

Beyond Reading: arXiv