15 April 2024
About this episode
How do you destroy a black hole? Turns out they're pretty tough cookies.
Kicking off a brand new series of Dead Planets Society, Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane take on the universe's most powerful adversaries. With the help of their cosmic toolbelt and black hole astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick at the University of Kansas, they test all the destructive ideas they can think of.
Whether it’s throwing masses of TNT at it, blasting it with a t-shirt gun full of white holes, loading it up with a multiverse worth of matter, or sending it back in time – they try everything to kill a black hole. Will they succeed?
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt to destroying the sun – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.
Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.
If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at deadplanets@newscientist.com. It may just feature in a later episode…