Extracting Energy From Rotating Black Holes
...black holes, such as, the inability of light or anything else to escape from within their event horizons, the singularity center, and accretion disks. Einstein’s General Relativity predicts that rapid rotation of a large mass produces further distortions of space-time, making rotating black holes clearly different from non-rotating ones. Just as stars rotate it is expected that most black holes in nature rotate.
One importatnt surface outside a rotating black hole is the ergosphere or ergoregion. The ergosphere is a large, ultra-dense, rotating mass that touches the event horizon of the black hole at the poles. This rotating mass creats an effect called frame dragging, where space-time is dragged around it, at the speed of light, in the direction of the rotation (Rotating). Objects and radiation can stay in orbit within the ergosphere without falling in, but can not hover or remain stationary. Objects, radiation, and light can even escape from the ergosphere.The Penrose Process predicts that objects can sometimes obtain enough energy to fly out of the ergosphere by “stealing” from the black hole’s rotational energy. It is predicted that if enough of the black hole’s mass of objects escape, the black hole will begin to spin more and more slowly and may eventually stop spinning all together (Penrose).
Sir Roger Penrose, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, theorized the Process in 1969. This process provides a theory for the extraction of energy from a rotating black hole (Bhat). This extaction is made possible by the existence of the ergoregion. In the ergoregion a particle is propelled in the same direction of the rotating space-time. In the process some piece of matter enters, spinning downward, into the black hole. Once it enters the ergosphere it is split into two, this process is called a dichotomy. A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into...
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