INNOVATIVE ENERGY SOURCES OR TAPPING THE UNIVERSE DRY? Physicists Propose Way to Harvest Incredible Energy From Black Holes In Wild Paper
December 14, 2023
Primordial black holes can theoretically be turned into powerful and rechargeable “batteries,” a new paper says. But it has some supermassive caveats. Researchers from Tianjin University in China have proposed a way to turn tiny black holes into batteries and nuclear reactors. They published their calculations in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Review D. In their out-there study, Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang of the Center for Joint Quantum Studies and Department of Physics describe how it could be possible to extract electric energy from the gravitational energy of a so far hypothetical kind of black hole called a Schwarzschild, or primordial, black hole—one that has mass but no spin or electric charge. There are a couple of ways theoretically to get energy out of a black hole, they wrote. For example, particles or waves moving around a spinning black hole can be flung away with more energy than they went in with, under certain conditions. Basically, they’re extracting energy from the black hole’s spin.