A black hole bomb – an idea first proposed in 1972 – has now been realised in the lab as a toy model

It’s ok guys, this is a SAFE TOY black hole.  We’re DEFINITELY not going to punch a hole into reality itself and suck the entire planet into the Event Horizon hell universe.

The way the world is going at the moment, I’m with Davros

Donate the reality bomb

Edit, bloody predictive text

Detonate the reality bomb

Guys, I think I know the solution to the Fermi paradox.

Between this and the growth of “AI”, anyone else thinking of the backstory to the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons?

For anybody who doesn’t want to read the article, which seems like most of the comments, the project is not about creating a black hole. It’s about building a device which accumulates and concentrates energy in the same way that a black hole’s ergosphere does/would. Not quite so sensational, but still very interesting.

> First ever ‘black hole bomb’ created in the lab

> A black hole bomb – an idea first proposed in 1969 – has now been realised in the lab as a toy model made from a rotating cylinder and magnetic coils. Studying the bomb could help us better understand real black holes.

> By Alex Wilkins
25 April 2025

> Feed a black hole enough energy and you could create an explosion
Art Furnace/Shutterstock

> Physicists have built the first ever black hole bomb, a long-theorised phenomenon where energy is boosted by a black hole and trapped by surrounding mirrors until an explosion occurs. Thankfully, this version is just a safe toy model rather than using a real black hole in space, but as the physical principles are identical, studying it could help researchers better understand how real black holes spin.

> The idea of extracting energy from a black hole was first proposed in 1969 by physicist Roger Penrose. He noted that a particle flying extremely close to a spinning black hole will gain energy due to a curious effect of general relativity, which sees the black hole drag and accelerate space-time around it.

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> Two years later another physicist, Yakov Zeldovich, realised that a similar process could occur in other scenarios, like light moving around a rapidly-spinning metal cylinder. He calculated that this “superradiance” effect should occur as long as the cylinder spins at the same frequency as the light – but this is incredibly fast. “It’s impossible to rotate anything [made] of matter at these kinds of speeds,” says Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK.
Zeldovich also suggested that, by surrounding the rotating cylinder with a cylindrical mirror, the amplified energy could be reflected and built up in a positive feedback loop, until the energy is either vented out or it explodes. Applying this idea to black holes, one could be used to produce a “black hole bomb”, releasing as much energy as a supernova. This would also work even without an external energy source, with the black hole amplifying tiny electromagnetic fluctuations in the vacuum of space itself, effectively producing energy from noise.

> All of this remained theoretical, but now Ulbricht and his colleagues have found a way to demonstrate Zeldovich’s feedback loop using a rotating aluminium cylinder and magnetic fields. Ulbricht built the first prototype during the UK’s first covid-19 lockdown in 2020. “Everything was closed, and I was really bored and I wanted to do something, so I built the setup and started to do these experiments, and I saw amplification. I was so super excited that, actually, you could say it rescued me during covid.”
He soon recruited colleagues to build a more robust experimental setup, which consists of a rotating aluminium cylinder powered by an electric motor, surrounded by three layers of metal coils producing a magnetic field that also rotates around the cylinder at a similar speed. In this setup, the coils act as the mirror and the magnetic field as light and, as Zeldovich predicted, this produced an even larger magnetic field emanating from the cylinder.

> “You throw a low-frequency electromagnetic wave against a spinning cylinder, who would think that you get back more than what you threw in? It’s totally mind boggling,” says Vitor Cardoso at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

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> Ulbricht and his team then showed that even without the coils producing an external magnetic field to begin with, the setup would still generate a runaway signal in the surrounding coils, just like the theoretical example of a black hole without an external energy source. “We’re basically generating a signal from noise, and that is the same thing that happens in the black hole bomb proposal,” says Ulbricht.
“Having accurate measurements in the laboratory of this process really allows you to confidently say, ‘Yes, this must happen in black hole physics as well’,” says Cardoso.

> While the lab version is only an analogue, it could help physicists understand how real black holes give energy to particles around them. This could help test theoretical ideas about as-yet unseen particle fields, such as one giving rise to dark matter.
“If new fields exist, we should be seeing, for instance, gravitational waves being emitted from this cloud around black holes, or we should see black holes spinning down because they’re giving their energy away to these new particles,” says Cardoso. “So superradiance is turning black holes into particle detectors, and much better particle detectors than [the Large Hadron Collider at] CERN can be for this type of dark matter.”

Could this explain the 50J- Proton that slammed into our atmosphere a few years back?

Is this analogous to laser cooling, but also in reverse?

With every day we come closer to DAoT humanity in the 40K timeline.

I am VERY uncomfortable with that

Anyone else remember the Charlie Sheen movie The Arrival where the aliens had these? Would toss it into a room and everything inside would be consumed?

So like could you use the “toy” version as a generator or…

I mean this is good. Black hole bombs convert mass to energy at a 100% rate

I picosecond of big bang like heat and then nothing. It’s humane warefare over blowing off limbs or slow radiation poisoning

This will probably get buried, but in their model they used magnetic coils which amplified the magnetic field exponentially. One of the (many), barriers to terraforming – or just plain residing on the surface – is our inability to generate a planetary magnetosphere on a geologically dead planet.

If we can expand this, among probably many other practical uses, would implementing these to create a dipole potentially work on a planetary scale to protect from solar radiation?

>A black hole bomb – an idea first proposed in 1969 – has now been realised in the lab as a toy model made from a rotating cylinder and magnetic coils.

Alex, What is the movie **The Philadelphia Experiment** famous for?

Black Hole hasn’t been on my apocalypse bingo card since the LHC fired up. Guess it’s time to put it back on.