A team of scientists from the University of Glasgow (Scotland) has carried out an experiment that has confirmed an ancient theory about how an alien civilization could use a black hole to generate energy.
Through a statement, the institution explained that in 1969, British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that energy could be generated by lowering an object into the ergosphere (the outer region) of a black hole, where the body would have to move faster than the speed of light to remain motionless.
Penrose predicted that the object could acquire negative energy in this unusual area of space. For this, it was necessary that when releasing the body it is divided into two parts so that one half falls into the black hole while the other is recovered.
Thus, the recoil action would serve to measure the loss of negative energy and the recovered half would gain energy extracted from the rotation of the black hole. However, the physicist explained that the engineering challenge was so great that only a highly advanced, perhaps alien, civilization could accomplish this task.
Proposal for an experiment on Earth
Two years later, the Soviet physicist Yakov Zeldovich considered that the theory could be tested with a more practical experiment on Earth. His idea posed ‘twisted’ light waves, which hit the surface of a rotating metal cylinder and which would end up being reflected with additional energy drawn from the cylinder’s rotation.
However, Zeldovich’s proposal required a metal cylinder that can rotate at least a billion times per second, a feature still impossible for the current limits of human engineering.
However, the Glasgow researchers “have finally found a way to experimentally demonstrate the effect Penrose and Zeldovich proposed by ‘twisting’ sound rather than light, a much lower frequency source and therefore much more practice to demonstrate in the laboratory ”, reads the text of the statement.
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