Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes wild ideas about how to tinker with the universe, from splitting the moon in half to triggering a gravitational wave apocalypse, and applies them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.please listen apple, spotify or our Podcast page.
Dead Planets Society is returning for Season 2. Intrepid hosts Chelsea White and Leah Crane chase down the most formidable enemy in the universe: the black hole. These cosmic behemoths are so large and so sturdy that they can swallow almost anything thrown at them without flinching. So is it even possible to destroy one?
Black holes are expected to spontaneously evaporate thanks to Hawking radiation, a process by which particles slowly leak out, but it would take much longer than the age of the universe for this to occur naturally. Just waiting is not really an option.So our host is joined by a black hole astronomer Alison Kirkpatrick Research was conducted at the University of Kansas to find a faster method.
Throwing something into a black hole, whether it’s a planet made of TNT or a chunk of antimatter, won’t do much. The black hole will swallow it and only become even bigger.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to dream up something that would fall into a black hole and destroy you. A black hole’s escape velocity, the speed at which it must fly away from its center to escape its gravitational influence, is faster than the speed of light, so a ship that can travel beyond its physical limits may be able to escape, and faster than the speed of light. A bomb that could explode quickly might be able to make a dent.
That’s just the beginning of the outlandish ways black holes could be destroyed. A theoretical object called a white hole might work, but that could mean sending a black hole back in time, which is bad for the past or the future.
Black holes could probably be stretched, but whether it works depends on how quantum mechanics and general relativity mesh together, one of the biggest unresolved issues in physics. It may be a problem. Our hosts have discovered that giant magnets can be useful, with potentially dire consequences.
topic:
- Black Hole/
- dead planet society
