A team led by astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi plans a daring experiment to launch a wafer-sized spacecraft toward the nearest black hole, Gaia BH1, about 1,600 light-years away. The mission aims to test the extreme physics of black holes and confirm Albert Einstein’s general relativity.
The idea is ambitious but feasible, with a hardware timeline spanning twenty to thirty years for the laser array and seventy years for the journey. Upon return, the signal could reach Earth in eighty to one hundred years.
Bambi’s team will use nanocrafts, gram-scale chips attached to meter-wide light sails, propelled by a ground-based laser array. This technology is already being explored in the Breakthrough Starshot project.
The mission involves three experiments:
1. Confirming the Kerr metric: By sending two probes to orbit the black hole at different heights and comparing their clock beats and redshifts.
2. Observing the event horizon: One probe will dive toward the invisible boundary, and if its signal fades exactly as theory expects, it would reinforce the presence of a classic event horizon.
3. Searching for shifts in nature’s constants: By examining atomic transitions whose energies depend on the fine-structure constant.
The estimated cost of building the laser array is around a trillion dollars, but Bambi believes that deep-space projects could share this technological groundwork.
Critics may point to the long wait for results, but history has shown that groundbreaking predictions can come true decades after initial doubts. This mission could provide humanity’s closest look yet at the strange frontier where space, time, and matter twist into something new.
Source: https://www.zmescience.com/science/black-hole-spacecraft-laser-powerd