Black holes, not a fun trip, and while yes they are already pretty weird with their singularity and swapping of space and time, they can get a lot weirder for one extremely non-complex reason, black holes actually rotate. Black holes can be measured in 3 different categories: rotation, electric charge, and gravity, for this specific article we will only be talking about all three, but why do they even rotate in the first place?
The singularity, a guaranteed death if you enter a black hole. Singularities often get misunderstood though as they are a lot of the time described as an infinitely small point at the center of the universe, but a point cant rotate, instead, singularities are actually in your future. When you enter a black hole, space and time swap places, this is why when you move in any direction in a black hole, you reach the singularity faster, the key to surviving the longest in this beast is doing… nothing. But is there a way to release this singularity, well there is! Sorta. You see, as we mentioned before, black holes are measured in spin, charge, and gravitational pull, with this, you can actually feed the black hole to a max, and when it reaches this max of rotation or charge, it wont take in any more food of either, this doesn’t apply to gravity though, but if we were to hit matter into the black hole at just the right angle, we might be able to overfeed, and destroy the event horizon, we did it! But this isn’t a good thing. This singularity could do anything, and would destroy the laws of physics itself. It could destroy, create, and change all matter, so it’s safe that event horizons trap the singularity, at the cost of everything else that falls in.
(Image from Sunny Vagnozzi)
When something is spinning, it won’t want to stop spinning, we call this force, angular momentum, this is true for stars as well, and when something spins and gets smaller, it will spin even faster, so as the star collapses and bounces off the iron core, it creates a product, I.E. a black hole that spins millions of times a second. This rotation is so strong that it drags and warps space-time, creating this weird area that surrounds the black hole, this is our ergosphere, where the rotation of the black hole forces everything to move; in fact, to even stand still here, you need to travel faster than the speed of light.
(Image from SpringerLink)
A weird thing about this area is that it’s like swimming in a wavy pool, if you do it right you can go faster than before, same thing for the ergosphere, if we were to launch a rocket inside the ergosphere, the rotation could give us a boost, and send us way faster than we could’ve gone otherwise, and of course this requires a lot of food but, we might have a way to harness this energy even more efficiently.
For a black hole with the mass of our sun, we will need around an 8 cm thick glass to surround and cover the blackhole, this is similar to a dyson-sphere, the difference being our build is more compact and less complex, next, shoot a laser into a black hole, as the laser bounces off the glass, some of the light falls into the black hole, this created a process called super radio scattering. As the laser gets faster and faster, we might be able to open up a window, creating an energy source for millions, if not billions of years, but there is a side effect. If the energy was not released enough or not at all, it would create an explosion the size of a supernova. In the end of our reality, future civilizations might find themselves in front of a black hole, when all stars cool down and the universe becomes dark and lifeless, there might still be places to go.
(All inspired by Kurzgesagt In A Nutshell’s black hole series)