“Unleashing the Universe’s Most Dangerous Weapon: Inside the Creation of the First ‘Black Hole Bomb’”

Remember that cheeky line from Oppenheimer—“Until somebody builds a bigger bomb…”? It’s like a grim punchline to the eternal hope that the atom bomb would end all wars. Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Instead, humanity just kept cranking up the volume with bigger, badder nukes. But hold on, because now the science nerds have dreamt up something that could make even the most gargantuan nuclear blast look like a firecracker at a Fourth of July picnic—a ‘black hole bomb’. Sounds like sci-fi or a Bond villain’s wet dream, right? Thankfully, the latest brainchild is more of a Frankenstein’s safe toy than a planet-wrecking doomsday device, but it revives a mind-bending idea from the late ’60s about particles siphoning energy from spinning black holes and, if taken to the extreme (please don’t try this at home), unleashing supernova-level destruction. While the real deal remains thankfully theoretical, this new model gives us a fascinating peek into black hole mechanics without turning Earth into cosmic dust. Can science serve up blockbuster knowledge without tearing down our world? Here’s hoping! LEARN MORE

“Until somebody builds a bigger bomb…” is a line that may be familiar to those of you who watched Oppenheimer and knew that the hope an atom bomb would render all wars pointless was never going to happen.

While nuclear weapons may function as a deterrence for many, they haven’t brought an end to all wars and in the decades since then we’ve constructed more bombs and bigger bombs.

Now scientists have developed a new ‘black hole bomb’, or at least the model of one, which could be so much more destructive if anyone was ever stupid enough to go ahead and construct the real thing.

According to New Scientist, this version is a ‘safe toy model’ rather than one which uses an actual black hole, but it builds on the theories of scientists who first proposed the idea.

The idea was first cooked up in 1969 after a scientist named Roger Penrose noticed that a particle getting close to a spinning black hole gained energy.

Particles that fly close to a spinning black hole actually gain energy, and it turns out we can do something similar (Lothar Knopp/Getty Images)

New Scientist adds that another scientist, Yakov Zel’dovich, realised that a particle could gain energy in other situations like light moving around a spinning metal cylinder.

He suggested that if you could get the cylinder to spin as fast as the light moved then it could work, but that wasn’t going to be possible so he suggested mirrors.

The idea goes that you could keep reflecting the energy and create a feedback loop until it triggers an explosion.

Theoretically, if this is powered by a black hole, it could create a ‘black hole bomb’ and produce as much energy as a supernova.

To give you an idea of how much power a supernova has, scientists from Warwick University recently discovered two stars set to explode in a type 1a supernovae 150 light years away.

When it explodes, the supernova will have ‘energy levels a thousand trillion trillion times that of the most powerful nuclear bomb’.

Now, Professor Hendrik Ulbricht of the University of Southampton has created a working model that demonstrates the feedback loop, but thankfully isn’t going to blow anyone up.

This version uses a rotating aluminium cylinder with coils and a magnetic field, where the coils stand in for the mirrors and the magnetic field replaces the light.

This ‘black hole bomb’ uses a rotating cylinder with coils and mirrors to try and replicate the power boosting effects (NASA Via Getty Images)

So this toy version of the ‘black hole bomb’ concept doesn’t actually use a black hole, which is probably for the best because if things went very badly wrong with it that would be utterly disastrous.

Instead, this development is more likely to help scientists gain a better understanding of how black holes work and provide energy to particles around them.

That seems like a much more worthwhile goal than finding new ways to blast chunks out of the planet.

Let’s just hope that nobody actually tries to build a proper ‘black hole bomb’. Earth could do without the comparable energy of a supernova being released upon it.