An illustration of a black hole erupting with energy. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
So, like, researchers made this thing called a “black hole bomb” in a lab for the first time. Back in 1972, these physicists named William Press and Saul Teukolsky talked about this theoretical thing called a black hole bomb. It’s all about mirrors trapping, reflecting, and making waves from a spinning black hole go crazy. And guess what? Now, a group of physicists from the University of Southampton, the University of Glasgow, and some fancy-sounding Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies at Italy’s National Research Council actually made this black hole bomb happen in real life. Wild, right?
The whole point of this experiment is to help those smart astrophysicists understand how black holes spin. The paper about this whole shebang was put out on this fancy preprint server called Arxiv on March 31, but it hasn’t been looked at by other researchers yet. The ideas for all this go back to some other physicists, though. Like, this British dude named Sir Roger Penrose had this idea in 1969 about getting energy out of a spinning black hole, which he called black hole superradiance. Then there was this other guy named Yakov Zel’dovich in 1971 who was all about this Zel’dovich effect that’s all about amplifying waves from a spinning object. And now, here we are with this black hole bomb in a lab.
So, the scientists in this new research used the Zel’dovich effect to do their experiment. They took this aluminum cylinder that was spinning because of an electric motor and put three layers of metal coils around it. These coils acted like mirrors, reflecting a magnetic field back to the cylinder. When they sent a weak magnetic field at the cylinder, they saw that the field coming back was even stronger. That’s that superradiance in action.
After that, they took away the weak magnetic field and let the cylinder do its thing. The cylinder started making its own waves, and because it was spinning so fast, it amplified those waves, making the coils store up energy. It’s like that Zel’dovich effect was partying hard. And guess what? Zel’dovich also said that if a spinning object moves faster than incoming waves, it goes from absorbing to amplifying those waves. And that’s exactly what happened in this experiment.
The scientists even pushed the experiment so hard that the circuit parts exploded. Talk about intense, right? But, hey, they didn’t make a real black hole, just a model. But this model shows that superradiance and amplification aren’t just black hole things — they can happen with other spinning objects too. And this model is gonna help physicists understand black hole rotation and some other fancy stuff at the crossroads of astrophysics, thermodynamics, and quantum theory. This research is waiting to get published in some snazzy journal.
So, like, that’s the deal with this black hole bomb in a lab. It’s all about making waves and amplifying energy, all thanks to some smart physicists and their experiments. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like this is pretty cool stuff. Who knew black holes could be so exciting, right?
