Is interstellar travel possible? Some arguments and questions

Interstellar travel is possible, says a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College.

Through numerical simulations and computer calculations, they have observed that rotating black holes can be traversed.

Scientists wanted to test whether Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) in Christopher Nolan’s film “Interstellar” could survive crashing into Gargantua – a fictional, rotating, supermassive black hole about 100 million times the mass of our sun.

The physical properties of this black hole were taken from the book written by Nobel laureate Kip Thorne, on which the film was based.

Do rotating black holes make interstellar travel possible?

These mysterious creatures called black holes are regions in space where there is an enormous accumulation of energy/matter, concentrated in such a small volume that the energy/mass density is almost infinite (singularity).

Gravity therefore becomes extremely high in that region, to such an extent that nothing, not even light, could escape.

This enormous density and extremely high temperature could cause an opening or hole in the fabric of space-time, which could serve as a bridge or portal for interstellar travel.

Black holes would be a kind of shortcut that would allow us to travel enormous distances in space in very short periods of time, thus exceeding the limits imposed by the speed of light. And this is not because we would exceed the speed of light, but because we would considerably shorten the trajectory.

In such a case, at least hypothetically, it is believed that a spacecraft could enter through a black hole and exit at the other end through a white hole, a region of space into which nothing, not even light, could enter, as shown in the image below.

However, until now it was not believed that black holes could be physically traversed, making interstellar travel possible; if a spacecraft were to enter this region of extremely high temperature and density, it would begin to suffer a series of very unpleasant stretches and compressions, which would increase before the object completely evaporated.

The key to success in such an endeavor was that, in the case of rotating black holes, there are additional factors that come into play that completely change the outcome of the numerical simulations.

The new study captures the most relevant physical effects that a spacecraft or any other large object would suffer when falling into a rotating black hole, such as Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

The paper examines the “tidal” forces experienced by Cooper’s spacecraft due to the Cauchy singularity, which is the black hole’s inner horizon.

Experiment is an open door to the future

During the experiment, a previously unobserved feature emerged: the effects of the singularity, in the context of a rotating black hole, lead to cycles of expansion and contraction in the spacecraft, which accelerates at such a rate that it does not have a “sustained” effect over time, leaving the object unharmed.

And the larger the black hole, the less resistance there is to this effect. In the case of Gargantua, the effect is so small that any ship and its passengers would not detect it; this would allow for a very smooth crossing.

Even if interstellar travel seems possible after this study, it should be mentioned that some approximations have allowed important simplifications in the calculation.

For example, the black hole was assumed to be isolated and free from surrounding disturbances. Therefore, numerical simulations should be carried out taking into account the real conditions of the black hole, since most of them are surrounded by cosmic material: dust, gases, radiation…

It should also be noted that this work did not take into account quantum effects of any kind, which are to be expected once the Cauchy horizon is crossed.

However, the researchers are very optimistic, as these results show that rotating black holes behave very differently from stationary ones, allowing us to make predictions that are essential to carry out such an achievement in real life.

Thus, the most important finding of this work is that the singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically “weak” and therefore does not cause damage to the objects it interacts with, thus making interstellar travel possible.

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Source: theconversation.com, journals.aps.org, resonancescience.org.

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