Physicists say they've built the first-ever "black hole bomb" — an ominous-sounding concept that dates back to the late 1960s, but that serves as little more than a harmless proof of concept.
As New Scientist reports, the idea is to boost energy with a black hole, then trap it with mirrors until you get an explosion. However, what the team created in a lab is a harmless test, without a real black hole that could suck the planet into oblivion.
And instead of looking for ways to wipe enemy alien civilizations off the map, the goal of the research is to study how black holes drag and accelerate the fabric of space-time around themselves, a phenomenon first theorized by physicist Roger Penrose in 1969.
In 1971, Belarusian physicist Yakov Zel'dovich came up with a spinning system to investigate whether the rotational energy of a black hole could be extracted by exploiting the extreme conditions inside it without breaking the laws of conservation of energy. At the scale of a real black hole light-years away, the energy generated and released could be as much as a supernova, according to existing theories.
In the latest experiment, detailed in a draft paper awaiting peer review, coauthor and University of Southampton physics professor Hendrik Ulbricht and his colleagues investigated the "Zel'dovich effect," using a cylindrical mirror to amplify energy and create a positive feedback loop.\
To read more, click here.