Useless Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about find out how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare. Pay attention on Apple, Spotify or on our podcast page.

Useless Planets Society is again for season two, and our intrepid hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane are going after the hardest adversaries within the universe: black holes. These cosmic behemoths are so massive and so sturdy that they will devour just about something that’s thrown at them with out a lot as flinching – so is it even doable to destroy one?

Black holes are anticipated to evaporate on their very own because of Hawking radiation, a course of by which they emit a gradual leak of particles, however this is able to take for much longer than the age of the universe to occur naturally. Simply ready isn’t actually an possibility, so our hosts are joined by black gap astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick on the College of Kansas in an try to discover a quicker means.

Throwing something on the black gap received’t actually assist both, whether or not it’s a planet fabricated from TNT or clumps of antimatter – the black gap will simply swallow it up and get much more huge.

That doesn’t imply it’s not possible to dream up one thing that will destroy a black gap by falling in. The escape velocity of a black gap – the pace at which one must fly away from its centre to flee its gravitational affect – is quicker than the pace of sunshine, so a ship that might journey past that bodily limitation would possibly be capable of escape, or a bomb that might explode quicker than the pace of sunshine would possibly be capable of make a dent.

That’s solely the start of the outlandish methods to doubtlessly wreck a black gap. Theoretical objects referred to as white holes would possibly work, however that might imply sending the black holes again in time, which wouldn’t be nice for the previous or the longer term.

A black gap might maybe be stretched out, however whether or not that works depends upon the query of how quantum mechanics and common relativity mesh collectively, which often is the largest unsolved query in physics. Our hosts discover that enormous magnets might assist, with doubtlessly horrifying outcomes.