This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce comes from the material surrounding them: superheated plasma in their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields.
But there is a more direct way to extract energy from a black hole. It's known as the Penrose process, and a new study asks whether we could discover a signature of this process. First proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969, the mechanism describes how you could extract energy directly from a rotating black hole, thus decreasing its total mass.
This is different from the usual mechanism in which black holes generate power as a byproduct of consuming matter and increasing mass. It relies on a feature of rotating black holes known as the ergosphere. As a black hole rotates, it drags space around it.
This frame-dragging effect is most powerful very close to the black hole. The ergosphere is a region around the black hole where the frame dragging is so strong you can't counter it. Even if you had a spaceship capable of approaching the speed of light, you couldn't overcome the rotating frame.
You will rotate around the black hole no matter what. Because of this, the timey-wimey effects of relativity get a little mucky-wucky. So suppose you loaded up a spaceship with useless junk and entered the ergosphere of a black hole.
As you are forced to orbit the black hole, you dump the trash, which is doomed to spiral into the black hole. But because of energy conservation, you get a boost of extra speed. So you can escape the black hole's grip with more energy than you started with.
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