Scientists Built a Black Hole Bomb for the First Time

Physicists have built a black hole bomb, which makes you wonder if somebody knows something we don’t that necessitated the building of it.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to be an immediately necessary weapon of mass destruction. The idea has been around since 1969, and the black hole bomb that was just created isn’t actually the real thing but rather a very scaled-down toy version.

First off, let’s define what the researchers describe as a “black hole bomb,” because from that description alone, it sounds like a bomb designed to destroy black holes. That’s not the case. It’s a device that feeds off the energy of a black hole until it eventually explodes.  

Nobody’s about to tear open the fabric of reality. This is just a very dramatic name for what’s essentially a science experiment with mirrors and magnets, all induced by COVID-era boredom.

How Did Black Hole Bombs Come to Be?

Back in 1969, physicist Roger Penrose theorized that you could suck energy out of a spinning black hole. Belarusian physicist Yakov Zel’dovich took it a step further in 1971, suggesting that you could extract that energy by bouncing waves off something spinning fast enough.

In 2020, University of Southampton physicist Hendrik Ulbricht was stuck at home like the rest of us. Presumably sick and tired of being up to his neck in homemade sourdough loaves, he decided to test the idea himself, using Penrose and Zel’dovich’s work as a launching pad.

According to a report from New Scientist, Ulbricht built a prototype in his lab using a spinning aluminum cylinder and magnetic fields, basically a bootleg garage version of a black hole. And it worked. Energy went in, more energy came out.

By 2024, Ulbricht and his team had built a more advanced version with magnetized coils spinning at dizzying speeds. His team confirmed the Zel’dovich effect, where low-frequency electromagnetic waves bounced off the spinning cylinder and came back stronger. Imagine yelling into a canyon, and the echo that came back was a sonic boom that blew you away.

Unless some grand cosmic threat demands that we upscale this little garage experiment into an actual bomb capable of destroying a malevolent spacefaring civilization hell-bent on ruling the earth, the experiment’s real-life benefit comes in helping scientists better understand how black holes energize particles and it offers some clues how dark matter works.

So, no, it’s not an actual literal bomb that’s designed to destroy, but one constructed to help build up our understanding of the universe. How are your lockdown hobbies coming along? Have you crocheted any tea cozies that have helped us better understand the universe? No? That’s too bad.

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