Thursday, 9 July 2015

general relativity - Black hole slingshot?


I have read this question:



Gravitational slingshot of light using a black hole/massive object


But that is talking about photons around a black hole.


Now I am interested in macro objects. I would like to know if a spaceship can theoretically use a black hole for a slingshot.


Spaceships can even with nowadays technology do slingshots around Jupiter.


I was wondering if they can do theoretically the same slingshot around a black hole?


Question:



  1. Can a spaceship theoretically use a black hole for a slingshot?



Answer




The answer is trivially yes: if you can do a slingshot around, say, the Sun, you can do it around a black hole, because the far field of a BH is the same as the far field of any other massive object.


The interesting question is whether there are tricks you can do by passing rather close to the event horizon: I'm not sure but I suspect there are not any easy ones, or possibly any, because slingshots are not extracting energy from the object itself but rather from its translational kinetic energy (in Newtonian terms).


There is one thing you can do with a spinning BH, which is called the Penrose process. This is not a slingshot but involves throwing part of your mass into the BH and extract some of its rotational momentum.


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