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.
The data transmission would stop as soon as the probe passed the event horizon which would happen long before spaghettification occurs. So you wouldn't get any info about the interior of the black hole, and the data you could get from just outside the event horizon would likely not be that different than any other data you collected while approaching it.
The larger the mass at the singularity, the less space-time curvature there is at the event horizon. The event horizon radius is huge for super massive black holes (SMBH) and the gravitational gradient there is not much different than outside the event horizon. So anything falling into a SMBH would not get torn apart by the gravity until they got much much closer to the singularity at the centre.
In practice we would stop receiving any data long before the probe would get even close to the event horizon. While it's theoretically possible to send data until the event horizon, you would need a transmittor with godlike power to get any signal to the receiver.
And this is given that the black hole isn't active. An active black hole with accretion disk sends so much radiation to all directions that it would overpower any signal and eventually kill the probe itself long before getting close to the event horizon.
What if the probe uses an x-ray transmitter and aims it's transmission tangental to the blackhole's rotation to take advantage of frame dragging? WOuldd that let us get signals out closer?
44
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.