The creation of a 'physics-defying robot' could allow astronauts to travel into black holes

We always push against something, no matter where we are - on land, in the air, or on the water. Since the concept of conservation of momentum has been in effect on Earth for a long time, physicists believe this is a constant.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have now demonstrated that bodies can move in curved regions without bumping into anything. A trio of NASA X-ray space telescopes recorded the formation of an astronomical disk near a supermassive black hole located in a galaxy around 290 million light-years from Earth. 

The disk's center rapidly heats up as it forms, generating a lot of X-ray photons in the process. A press release issued by the university on Monday stated that Zeb Rocklin, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics, was the principal investigator of the new study.

As part of this project, a robot had to be engineered to be kept on a sphere with unprecedented levels of isolation from its surroundings, so that its curvature-induced effects would be dominant over its surroundings.

'As a first step towards conducting a systematic study of the motion in curved space, we observed our shape-changing object moving on the simplest curved space, a sphere,' Rocklin said in a statement.

'We learned that the predicted effect, which had been dismissed by some physicists, actually occurred: as the robot changed shape, it inched forward around the sphere in a way that could not have been attributed to environmental factors.'

The purpose of this research was to determine how objects can travel across curved areas. To limit the contact between the sphere and the surrounding objects, they allowed a set of motors to travel along curved rails as moving masses. 

The motors were then attached to a rotating shaft, causing them to always revolve. The shaft was supported by air bearings and bushings to reduce friction, and its position concerning Earth's gravity was modified to reduce the gravitational pull on it. 

The robot began to feel the effects of gravity and friction after that. With these forces combined with curvature effects, a peculiar dynamic is created with qualities that neither force could have created on its own. As a result of Rocklin's experiments, he hopes that other researchers will be able to look into these curved worlds with the help of these new methods.

As the research illustrates, it is possible to create curved environments and how they fundamentally violate the rules created for flat spaces and our intuition. A robot that can simulate the environment in which celestial objects are structured could, one day, assist us in navigating around a black hole by simulating the terrain in which these objects live.