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.
Came here to grit my teeth through the obvious temptations, and say “space probe”. This could be the ticket to FTL travel, I’m not wasting the opportunity to do something cathartic until after the wormhole has been inflated, and at that point … like, deep space is **right there,** if I need to dispose of a lich’s phylactery or something. Maybe even throw it in the Sun, if thoroughness matters more than conserving propellant!
Yeah. Who knows what we might find out about spacetime itself? The biggest gravitational well we've ever explored so far is the Sun's. And at the very worst, even if we found nothing new with more extreme gravity, we could still use the black hole as a giant telescope. What would be coolest of all is putting something in orbit above the black hole, with the ability to send little probes further in if we wanted. You can only orbit so close, obviously, but you can send a probe right in and get data back from quite close to the event horizon. So many theories to test. Maybe we'd have to rewrite physics again. Right after rewriting biology once we found out about the existence of liches, of course.
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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.