We know black holes to be very ferocious. If you get sucked, there is no escape. Even the fastest particles—light—are destined to be swallowed up. But what if maybe, just maybe, we encounter a black hole? Is it already a dead end? (Hey! This isn’t just pipe dream. Space tourism is now a thing!)
Scientists reveal it’s actually possible to escape from a black hole. That is, by making use energy from the black hole’s powerful gravitational fields.
Previously we have Stephen Hawking explain how to possibly escape a black hole. Kind of- by reversing space and time, calculating the patterns, and remaking it. It’s just that your physical body is not safe from the black hole. But they are only recreating your information.
Black holes are regions in space-time which exhibits strong gravitational effects. They are expected to be formed when massive stars collapsed due to the end of their life cycle. However, after they are formed, they continue to grow by absorbing other masses surrounding them.
Making Simulations
The energy of black holes came from their rotation, which jets near-light-speed plasmas into space in opposite sides. These jets can extend outward for millions of light years and can be considered as one of the most powerful displays in the universe.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley combined decades-old theories to make simulations on a supercomputing center at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
These simulations focus on the so-called “driving mechanisms” in the plasma jets in black holes which allows them to steal energy from its powerful gravitational fields. This would then be used to propel them from the mouth of the black hole.
Kyle Parfrey, Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Nuclear Science Division at Berkeley Lab and head of the study said that how the energy in a black hole’s rotation can be extracted to make jets has been a question for a long time.
Combining Theories
The simulations combined the theory on how electric currents twist the magnetic fields around a black hole to form jets. And another separate theory about how particles that cross through a black hole’s event horizon or point of no return can appear like it carries in negative energy and “lower the black hole’s overall rotational energy” from a distant observer.
They compared it to eating food that would cause you to lose calories instead of gaining them. Slurping in these “negative-energy” particles would cause black holes to actually lose mass.
Parfrey added that the more complex simulations that could describe the jets better would require expertise in both the general theory of relativity and in plasma physics. “I thought it would be a good time to try to bring these two things together,” he said.
The researchers also highlighted that the simulations can naturally produce effects known as the Blandford-Znajek mechanism and the Penrose process. The Blandford-Znajek mechanism describes the electric currents that twist the magnetic fields to form jets. Meanwhile, the Penrose process describes what takes place when the negative-energy particles are swallowed down by the black hole.
