Scientists believe that the effect of spinning in a highly magnetic environment will allow energy to be extracted from these cosmic bodies.
Two physicists from Chile and the United States believe that humans could one day harness the tremendous energy that black holes harbor. To achieve this, scientists say, magnetic field lines must be cut and reconnected, which is currently impossible due to how far away the Earth is from any black hole, but it could be possible in the distant future if our planet gets close to it. Enough for any of these celestial bodies.
To extract energy from a black hole, it would be necessary for our planet to be in the so-called ergosphere, that is, the hole’s outermost region. In that region, part of the connecting cosmic matter could still escape completely and avoid falling into the event horizon that conceals the inner part of the hole, but the rotation of the gravitational field carries with it spacetime already at this height. in addition to, It is necessary that the hole rotates quickly enough In a paper published in January in Physical Review D., the researchers say the surrounding plasma is strongly magnetized.
It is the high relative velocity between the plasma currents picked up by the hole and those emerging from it that makes it possible to obtain energy in large quantities. The most impressive thing about this process is The effectiveness of magnetic reconnection And activate the plasma to reach a maximum value of 3/2, i.e., 150%.
Philip Asenjo, one of the study’s authors and associate professor at the School of Engineering and Sciences at the University of Adolfo, said that this amount of energy is much higher than what “any power station operating on Earth would generate”. Ibanez (Chile). However, the scientist believes that an efficiency greater than 100% is possible because Black holes lose energy, Which is delivered free of charge to the runaway plasma.
It is possible that the energy extraction process described in the article is already operating in space and manifests itself in the eruption of black holes in the form of intense radiation bursts that are sometimes detected from Earth. The new thing would be to try to take advantage of this unexplained natural process, something that could be beneficial “in thousands or millions of years”, when humanity can meet the challenge of “Survive near a black hole Without harnessing the energy of the stars, ”says another co-author, Luca Comiso, of Columbia University.
A better understanding of how magnetic reconnection occurs in the atmosphere could also be crucial Our interpretation is directed to the notes Current and Future Black Holes with Telescopes. “
Since the mid-twentieth century, physicists have repeatedly raised the possibility of using the energy available in the atmosphere of black holes, but they considered that such a feat would not be within the reach of a very technically advanced alien civilization.
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