Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole
18 comments
·October 24, 2025wartywhoa23
It is stated multiple times across the article that the probe would need a means of changing is trajectory, but not even a hint of idea how that could possibly be done is given. So the most important and blocking aspect of the mission is simply skimmed over, and the rest of it is built upon this omission as if it was something trivial to come up with.
Does anyone have an idea how to equip a 1g spacecraft with any means to steer itself at 1/3 speed of light? The kinetic energy at that speed would seem to require something very incompatible with the weight constraint, to my understanding.
vee-kay
Related: "Project Solar Sail" by Arthur-Clarke and others, is a good anthology (stories, essays and illustrations) about the new Age of Sailing (Sailing in Space)via lightships and solar sails.
Mistletoe
How do you stop if your solar sail has you going near light speed? Or does it strand you halfway between stars in the doldrums where the force on both sides of your sail equals out from two stars?
SiempreViernes
You don't stop this type of craft, it's strictly accelerate and coast type of thing.
Also note that "solar sail" is a bit misleading, the (now apparently dead) Breakthrough Starshot design was a big reflector "sail" in space and very many lasers on Earth to power it, it's not actually driven by a stellar wind directly.
hvb2
You would fold the sail?
voidUpdate
That only stops you accelerating, it doesn't put the brakes on
jordanb
Deceleration is the same as acceleration. You use the light of the star you're approaching to slow down.
api
What’s be super cool is discovering a! asteroid mass primordial black hole in our solar system. No epic interstellar flight needed.
It would be super hard to detect though. We’d have to spot it by gravitational effects or get very lucky and notice lensing. It would emit nothing unless it happened to be nomming on some matter, and even then it’d be so small that the signal would be weak.
the8472
We do not what such a thing anywhere near Earth though. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9911309
noam_k
That would be cool.
I read somewhere that a black hole with the mass of the moon will absorb about as much cosmic radiation as it emits Hawking radiation. This is a fine line between "the black hole disappears before we can examine it" and "oops, we got eaten by a black hole".
MomsAVoxell
Hey, its not like an analog of "Yeah, lets just throw some more mass at the newly-forming black hole in our neighbourhood", said every human that has ever thrown things into the fire, forever ..
hansmayer
Such a fantastic overview. And here we are, instead of building the infrastructure for accelerating solar sails, we're investing the money in AI-pornbots instead :/
radu_floricica
Considering AI-pornbots are increasing the derivate of the function, they might actually be the right move.
null
einrealist
At least the AI-pornbots will operate from space. /s
The most aggressive yet most realistic project we could reasonably do is the SGL Telescope
Won't happen under this administration and really might take a planet-wide effort but it would be incredible
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/07/22/solar-gravitation...
https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-mission-to-reach-th...