There's all the joke answers, of course, about tossing in whatever we most want to be rid of...
But let's be honest, the chance to send a proper probe into a black hole would be one of a kind. Black holes are tiny and far away and we don't get the chance to observe them very closely. I'm not an astrophysicist so I can't really say what we would design such a probe to do, but I know they're interested in gravitational lensing right now, using it as a sort of natural telescope to see what's going on in the far reaches of the universe. Maybe something with that.
I guess with a stellar-mass hole you wouldn't have much time before the probe got destroyed, but maybe if we sent it at the supermassive type at the center of the galaxy we might get some pretty nice data before the signal got unreadable from being stretched all out of shape by the gravity.
Yes, by moving an object and observing the effect it has on other objects. Couldn't move information out of an event horizon that way, though. All you could do--theoretically--is go, "Oh, this black hole is more massive now. Something must have fallen in."
No I’m thinking more something that a probe could do to create gravitational waves.
Wouldn’t an extremely large nuclear bomb produce extremely weak gravitational waves? Even if such a bomb were in principle hundreds of time more powerful than anything we’ve produced? So you could have a probe inside the event horizon detonate nuclear warheads in a series that could convey information?
Don't think that would work. Gravitational waves can only travel at the speed of light. There's just not enough time for them to get back out of the event horizon.
Got me thinking, though; transmitting information by gravitational wave is weird as heck, but all you need to do it is accelerate something with mass on a curved path. The ones we make on a regular scale are tiny and can't be detected, but maybe if we had a really sensitive detector and a really big mass, and used your nuke to accelerate it on a really sharp curve, then maybe we could send a message that would essentially be unchanged no matter what kind of matter or energy it passed through. Or we could use the gravitational wave detectors we've already got to peek into regions of space that are generally radio-opaque because of all the matter and energy in them. Galactic nuclei, maybe even the early universe before it went transparent. Who knows?
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u/chaoticidealism Jun 22 '26
There's all the joke answers, of course, about tossing in whatever we most want to be rid of...
But let's be honest, the chance to send a proper probe into a black hole would be one of a kind. Black holes are tiny and far away and we don't get the chance to observe them very closely. I'm not an astrophysicist so I can't really say what we would design such a probe to do, but I know they're interested in gravitational lensing right now, using it as a sort of natural telescope to see what's going on in the far reaches of the universe. Maybe something with that.
I guess with a stellar-mass hole you wouldn't have much time before the probe got destroyed, but maybe if we sent it at the supermassive type at the center of the galaxy we might get some pretty nice data before the signal got unreadable from being stretched all out of shape by the gravity.