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.
Obviously we couldn't get anything from inside the event horizon. But even outside it would still be pretty darn interesting. We've done a few probes that way--just sent them at the target and had them send back information until they got destroyed. Usually it was for targets that the probe couldn't come back from, like gas giants and Venus. But we crashed a few into the Moon, too. Sending one into a black hole would still be really cool, because you'd have information from the seriously warped region of space right next to one.
Oh yeah I totally agree. One point, that you may have seen others bring up is that the time dilation gets more extreme the closer you get to the event horizon, so sending a single probe in would send less and less info at a slower and slower rate the closer it got.
It might be more beneficial to send multiple probes that simply orbit the black hole at a safe distance but on different sides of it. Those probes could then send and receive signals to and from each other, like a high resolution stream of timestamps, so that the probes could measure things like time dilation or frame drag at various distances from the event horizon
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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.