Slashdot Mirror
'Halo Drive' Would Use Black Holes To Power Spaceships (space.com)
A new study from researchers at Columbia University in New York suggests future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the universe. The study "envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light," reports Space.com. "Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a 'halo drive,' as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected." From the report: Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls "the gamer's mindset." Using what he called a "halo drive" -- named for the ring of light it would create around a black hole -- Kipping found that even spaceships with the mass of Jupiter could achieve relativistic speeds. "A civilization could exploit black holes as galactic waypoints," he wrote in a study accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and detailed online Feb. 28 in the arXiv preprint server.
The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like." The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system. Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.
The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like." The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system. Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.
TFS doesn't say this, but the idea is to use spinning pairs of black holes. You shoot photons back, and by gravitational slingshot they come back with more energy, and they propel the vessel by hitting the sail.
Co-orbiting black holes, moving at relativistic speeds before their merger, are untapped batteries. There are an estimated 10 million black hole pairs in our galaxy.
It never ceases to amaze me at the amount of fantasy physics that occur in science. Take the classic "wormhole" concept where they fold a piece of paper and put pencil through it to imitate space being folded by phenomenon so that great distances can be traveled with little effort. It is entirely bunk, just like time, everyone knows it, but because they are enamored by the fantasy of it, they agree to it as a concept. Well here is a real physics check, collapsing that much volume (space is not actually empty) into a small space like that would become a black hole... and then you have your next problem... getting whatever mechanism that caused the collapse to un-collapse it, considering the nature of that phenomenon. Good luck with that madness. Same problem here... to drive a laser powerful enough to do what they are talking about likely means having enough power to accomplish the task in other ways. not to mention a few other important factors. Space is moving, things are bending, we cannot see what is on the other side, we cannot effectively predict where we will be when the beam comes back around... and finally... light is still too slow for that kind of effective use because of relativity. The light itself may speed up or slow down but our usage of it will drastically reduce its effectiveness, unless some other new technology like the EM drive were to be discovered. Right now.. its a bleeding fantasy.
Instead of calling it spacetime, it should be called Space and Energy. Time is nothing more than a conceptual tool we use to facilitate the measurement of Space and Energy as it changes in the reality we are able to grasp and observe.
Blue shift. Each individual photon gains energy. The formula is pretty simple E=hc/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
What a bunch of thieves.
The concept of a "Black hole driven starship" is called the Kugelblitz engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Looking through the comments on a site *FOR NERDS* no one has brought this up yet. Shame.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM