Black hole probe science

[Aghanim]

Lets say someone invents some sort of warp drive so we can go to the nearest black hole within reasonable timeframe and deploy some kind of probe there. What science can be done through that, which is impossible to get through telescope observation?

[K^2]

Measuring Hawking Radiation very close to Event Horizon could be useful. There are some unanswered questions about Cosmic Censor that this could bring light to.

Although, if we actually have a warp drive, we could make a lot of these measurements on the warp bubble.

[Streetwind]

It would also help verify time dilation on scales far more drastic than anything we can measure in a lab on Earth or elsewhere in space.

Sometimes confirming even generally accepted postulations is useful. You'd be surprised how many vacuum chamber operators have never actually seen the simple "feather falls as fast as a bowling ball in a vacuum" gravity experiment despite their work environment, and are amazed when they see it in action for once...

[PB666]

5 hours ago, Aghanim said:

Lets say someone invents some sort of warp drive so we can go to the nearest black hole within reasonable timeframe and deploy some kind of probe there. What science can be done through that, which is impossible to get through telescope observation?

You can collect particles thrown out from the poles, not from the black hole itself but from kinetic decay of gasses and space dust near tge event horizon. 

[rudi1291]

Can´t we go inside a black hole, if we have a warp drive?

[AngelLestat]

7 hours ago, rudi1291 said:

Can´t we go inside a black hole, if we have a warp drive?

I guess you can enter and go out, but you will be no able to make any measurements (any kind) from the outside.
And if you enter with the warp drive, and you shutdown the bubble, then I guess is not possible to restart the bubble and go back to your universe, because this does not longer exist.

Not sure, maybe K2 can correct me, but the true is, that we dont know with certain how physics behave with a warp drive (faster than C) and crossing the event horizon.
 

Edited May 2, 2016 by AngelLestat

[James Kerman]

I was reading about experiments with superfluids and how analogue black holes have been created that swallow sound.  It's my understanding that analogue hawking radiation has been detected (phonons) in these experiments and the paper is being reviewed at the moment.  There is some postulation that these superfluids could be used to create analogues to explore expansion and dark energy.

I believe the article was in the latest popular science.  I will edit this tomorrow with more details.

OK so the article is in New Scientist Australia 9/4/16.

Physicist William Unruh of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver saw some parallels between the metric of general relativity that describes space-time and equations used to describe superfluid flow in 1981.

In 1995 the first Bose Einstein condensates were created.  BEC's have a different state of matter beyond solid, liquid or gas because they are cooled down to a few nanokelvin above absolute zero - the individual atoms lose their identity and occupy the same quantum state, behaving and flowing as one.

In a BEC the speed of sound is just millimetres per second.

Iacopo Carusotto, a BEC theorist at the BEC center in Trento, Italy, began creating computer models of sonic black holes in 2005.

Jeff Steinhauer, an atomic physicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, developed temperature measurement and magnetic containment tools and in 2009 He used lasers to accelerate a BEC to supersonic speed.  The result was the first sonic black hole with an event horizon.

In 2014 Steinhauer accelerated a thin stream of condensate to the speed of sound and then allowed it to slow, creating a black-hole horizon from which no sound could escape and a white-hole horizon into which no sound could enter.  Hawking phonons created by the black hole bounced between the two horizons produced increasing Hawking radiation in the same way as light is stimulated in a laser.

The paper (arxiv.org/abs/1510.00621) is under peer review and if it's accepted it will be the first detection of Hawking radiation and its entanglement.

 

Edited May 4, 2016 by James Kerman