Scientists believe the Milky Way could be home to as many as 100 million stellar-mass black holes, but much about these giant celestial phenomena remains a mystery. Now, an astronomer believes it may one day be possible to send a tiny spacecraft no heavier than a dime to the edges of a black hole in order to unlock its secrets and advance our understanding of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
“It may sound really crazy, and in a sense closer to science fiction,” Cosimo Bambi, a professor of physics at Fudan University in China, said in a press release. “But people said we’d never detect gravitational waves because they’re too weak. We did — 100 years later. People thought we’d never observe the shadows of black holes. Now, 50 years later, we have images of two.”
At this stage, the concept is highly speculative, and there are substantive, possibly prohibitive, ...
