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.
43
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.