Astronomer says aliens might zap black holes with lasers to travel the galaxy. - NBCNewsMACH
from their trips around black holes. But they do pick up energy. That energy takes the form of increased wavelength of the light, and the individual photon"packets" carry more energy than they had when they entered the mirror.In a paper published in the preprint journalDavid Kipping, the Columbia astronomer, proposed that an interstellar spacecraft could fire a laser at the gravity mirror of a fast-moving black hole in a binary black hole system.
This system, which Kipping termed the"halo drive," has a big advantage over more traditional lightsails: It doesn't require a massive fuel source. Current lightsail proposals require more energy to accelerate the space shuttle to"relativistic" speeds than humanity has produced in its entire history.
With a halo drive, all that energy could just be sapped from a black hole, rather than generated from a fuel source.from the black holes that it wouldn't absorb enough light energy to add additional speed. It's possible to solve this problem by moving the laser off the spaceship and onto a nearby planet, he noted, and just precisely aiming the laser so it emerges from the black hole's gravity well to hit the spaceship.
A civilization might be using a system like this to navigate the Milky Way right now, Kipping wrote. There are certainly enough black holes out there. If so, that civilization might be sapping so much momentum from black holes that it would be messing with their orbits, and we could possibly detect the signs of alien civilization from the eccentric orbits of binary black holes.
And if no other civilizations are out there doing this, he added, perhaps humanity could be the first.
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