Black holes are a terrifying and unsettling concept. They are unavoidable! They eat everything! Nothing ever seems to surface!
These beliefs’ degree of accuracy ranges from questionable to false. Furthermore, two physicists have recently computed the potential extraction of the black hole stone. Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang of Tianjin University in China suggest that microscopic black holes might be used as a potential energy source.
According to their estimations, these ultradense objects have the potential to produce gigaelectronvolts of energy by functioning as nuclear reactors and rechargeable batteries. In actuality, the highest known concentrations of gravity in the universe are located right outside the black hole, which is where the energy is extracted from.
Though they’re not always easy to identify, black holes are expected to be abundant in our universe. Based on our findings, it appears that the mass of these enigmatic objects varies from tens of billions of solar masses to around five times the mass of the Sun. However, there is another weight class for black holes—at least in theory. These are the first black holes, and they can have sizes as small as subatomic particles in space.
Primordial black holes are believed to have evolved from overdensities in the primordial plasma that flooded the Universe after the Big Bang, whereas stellar mass black holes form from the collapsed cores of huge dead stars. Primordial black holes may or may not exist; if they do, a plethora of opportunities arise. One is dark matter; primordial black holes have long been thought to be a promising contender. It appears that we may perhaps utilize these potential space-time dimples in some capacity.
Electrical energy is created from non-electrical energy using a battery. Utilizing nuclear processes, a nuclear reactor generates energy. And Mai and Yang contend that hypothetically a tiny black hole could
accomplish both.
“Taking the fact that the black hole has extremely strong gravitational force, an interesting question arises: considering at least theoretically, could we use the gravitational force of black holes to generate electric energy, i.e. make use of black holes as batteries?,” their report states.
“In this paper, we argue theoretically that we can use a Schwarzschild black hole as a rechargeable battery.”
Hawking radiation is currently an issue with very tiny black holes. This is the mass that a black hole loses as a result of interactions between the surrounding quantum fields and the black hole’s event horizon. The speed at which mass is lost due to Hawking radiation increases with black hole size. A black hole will vanish completely really fast if it is tiny enough. It is also anticipated that a small black hole will suck up things very quickly, making it challenging to remove anything from the area around it.
It was determined by Mai and Yang that electrical energy may be produced by replenishing and recharging a primordial black hole above a specific mass. Refueled with charged particles, an atom-sized black hole with a mass of 1015–1018 kg should be able to generate this energy. The black hole can, the researchers calculated, convert up to 25% of the input mass into energy at its maximum. That is an efficiency rate of 25%. The majority of solar panels that are sold commercially have efficiency rates that are lower than 23%.
The group also discovered that a black hole may achieve efficiency comparable to that of a nuclear reactor. Their calculations demonstrated that 25% of the mass of an alpha particle created by radioactive decay can be transformed into kinetic energy in the vicinity of a primordial black hole. We won’t be able to test it very well, unfortunately. We couldn’t just go grab a primordial black hole, never mind contain and control it, even if we were positive they existed. However, the analysis raises some worthwhile questions.
The scientists specifically claim that the mass range of their black hole reactor model fits within that of dark matter, which raises the exciting prospect that we could be able to use one of the universe’s most enigmatic types of matter to power our refrigerators.
The study is accessible on arXiv and is scheduled for publication in Physical Review D.