Bold statement: The frontier of black holes might be closer than we think, and the real challenge isn’t just observing them—it’s visiting them.
Cosimo Bambi, an astrophysicist at Fudan University in China, jokingly concedes that sounds wild. Yet he remembers a historical shift: people once doubted we’d ever glimpse a black hole’s silhouette or detect gravitational waves. On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope produced the first image of a black hole—the supermassive one at Messier 87. Three years later, they revealed Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way. Bambi argues that since we can now “see” black holes, the next logical step is to go visit one.
The big question is where to go. Sagittarius A* lies about 26,000 light-years away. The closest known stellar-mass black hole, Gaia-BH1, sits roughly 1,560 light-years away. Bambi proposes a more provocative possibility: there could be much nearer, smaller black holes—perhaps as close as 20 to 25 light-years away.
This is speculative but not fantastical. In 2023, researchers from the University of Padua in Italy and the University of Barcelona in Spain found that stellar-mass black holes could exist within the Hyades open cluster, a loose star group about 150 light-years away. Their simulations matched the cluster’s mass and size only when black holes were part of the dynamics, suggesting nearby black holes might be lurking closer than we thought.
The concept is playful yet serious: a ship too heavy with fuel won’t reach extreme speeds, so Bambi borrows an idea from Breakthrough Starshot. Instead of a traditional spacecraft, he envisions micro-probes—tiny spacecraft with microchips, about the size of a paperclip. These nanocrafts would hitch a ride on ultra-thin light sails designed to catch photons. On Earth, a powerful ground-based laser would lock onto the sails and push them forward. With no onboard fuel or engines, the probes would accelerate continuously. Bambi targets speeds near 100 million miles per hour, roughly one-third the speed of light. At that pace, the probes could traverse cosmic distances in years instead of centuries for conventional rockets.
If there’s a black hole within 20–25 light-years, the math becomes especially intriguing. At about one-third light speed, a voyage to such a destination would take roughly seven decades. But the mission doesn’t end upon arrival. After passing by or skirting the black hole, the probe must relay data back to Earth. Even at the speed of light, that information would take about 20 years to reach home. The builders might never witness the discoveries firsthand.
If the nearer black holes prove elusive, the Hyades cluster—now a leading candidate—remains a possibility at around 150 light-years away. At the same pace, the journey would extend to at least 420 years. Rather than a mission, this becomes a message in a bottle, sent across centuries to future generations who might still be listening.
Nothing here happens tomorrow. The laser system needed to push a sail to relativistic speeds doesn’t exist yet, and neither do the paperclip probes with enough computing power to photograph a black hole and transmit the data back. Yet Bambi believes the timeline could shrink as technology advances, driven by cheaper components and ongoing miniaturization. He acknowledges the idea sounds like science fiction in a recent press release, but he also points to past breakthroughs that reshaped what seemed possible. Gravitational waves were once thought undetectable, yet we detected them a century later. The shadows of black holes were once unimaginable, and now we have images of two. For Bambi, visiting a black hole is simply the next item on a long list—one that seems crazy only until it’s accomplished.
