It sounds like a sci-fi scenario: a tiny spacecraft weighing no more than a paper clip, propelled by lasers, flies toward a black hole at nearly the speed of light, on a mission to test the laws of physics. Although the technology is not yet mature, scientists believe that this idea can be realized within the next few decades.
According to research published in the Cell Press journal "iScience" by Italian astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University, the mission needs to solve two major problems: locating near-Earth black holes and developing a durable detector. Existing theories speculate that a black hole may exist 20 to 25 light-years away from the Earth, but its detection relies on indirect observation methods, such as analyzing the impact of black holes on surrounding stars and light. Scientists expect to find the target within the next decade.
Traditional chemical fuel spacecraft are not capable of this task, and gram-scale nanodetectors (including microchips and light sails) may be critical. Ground-based lasers can blast photons into a light sail, accelerating the detector to one-third the speed of light. At this speed, the detector will reach the black hole in about 70 years, and it will take another 20 years to transmit the data back, and the whole journey will take about 80 to 100 years.
The core scientific goals of the mission are to verify the existence of a black hole's "event horizon", explore changes in physical laws in extreme environments, and test the universality of general relativity. At present, the cost of laser systems alone is as high as 1 trillion euros, and nanodetector technology has not yet broken through, but technological progress may narrow the gap in the next 30 years.
Looking back at the history of science, gravitational wave detection and black hole imaging were once considered impossible, but eventually became a reality. This research may open a new chapter for mankind's understanding of the universe.