How Do You Extract Energy From A Black Hole Using A Device That Never Spins?

In 2026, physicists at CUNY built a ring of electronic parts that never physically moves, timed its switching so precisely that incoming radio waves reacted as if the ring were spinning faster than light, and the waves came out 7.8 decibels louder, roughly six times more powerful. That recreates, without ever touching a real black hole, a trick physicist Roger Penrose proposed in 1969: near a spinning black hole, space itself gets dragged around fast enough that splitting something in two there lets one half fall in while the other escapes carrying away more energy than it started with. Done over and over, that trick can drain up to 29% of a spinning black hole's energy before the black hole runs out of spin to give.

Picture a black hole doing its most famous trick: pulling everything in, giving nothing back. That is the reputation. It is not the whole story.

In July 2026, a team at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center switched on a ring-shaped circuit. Nothing in it moved. No motor. No spinning disk. Not even a fan. Radio waves went in. They came out stronger, the team reported. The ring had faked one trick. It is the one thing a spinning black hole can do that nothing else can: hand back more energy than it received.

Why is that strange? Because a real spinning black hole does something odd to the space around it. You need to see that part first.

What Is A Black Hole's Ergosphere, And Why Does Space Itself Spin There?

A black hole is a region where gravity has crushed matter tight. Not even light can climb back out past a boundary called the event horizon. That much is famous. What a spinning black hole does to the space just outside that boundary is less famous, and stranger.

Here is the everyday version first. Dip a spoon into a jar of honey and twirl it. The honey right next to the spoon gets dragged around with it. A little further out, the honey drags less. Further out still, it barely moves. Now swap the spoon for a spinning black hole, and the honey for space itself. NASA's Gravity Probe B satellite confirmed this happens, even around a slow body like Earth. It pinned the effect down to about 19%, well short of the 1% its designers had hoped for, but squarely in agreement with Einstein. A spinning mass drags the fabric of space around with it. Physicists call this frame dragging.

Around a spinning black hole, frame dragging turns extreme. Close enough in, space gets dragged around faster than light itself moves. That region, sitting just outside the event horizon, is the ergosphere. Everything inside it, light included, is forced to orbit in the direction of the spin. Nothing can sit still there.

Here is the one detail the rest of this article rests on. The ergosphere is not the event horizon. You can fall into it and climb back out, the way you can swim out of a strong current if you fight hard enough. That single fact, that the ergosphere lets you leave, is what makes stealing energy from it possible at all. Hold on to it.

What Does "7.8 Decibels Of Amplification" Actually Mean?

Before going further, it helps to know what the CUNY team's headline number means. It carries most of this story's weight.

The decibel is not a normal unit like a meter or a kilogram. It is a ratio, and a logarithmic one: every 10 decibels means ten times more power. So 7.8 dB is not "7.8 units" of anything physical. It is shorthand for a power ratio of about 10^(7.8/10), which works out to roughly 6.

In plain terms, the wave left the ring carrying about six times the power it walked in with.

Six times is not a rounding error. It is the gap between a whisper and a shout, produced without a single moving part. Hold on to that number too. Everything below explains where the extra five parts of power came from, and it was not the ring's own power supply footing the whole bill.

Can You Really Pull Energy Out Of A Black Hole?

Short answer: yes. Physicists have known how, on paper, since 1969.

That year, Roger Penrose proposed a thought experiment. Drop an object into the ergosphere of a spinning black hole. Have it split into two pieces while it is still inside. Arrange the split right, and one piece falls through the event horizon while the other shoots back out. Check the energy books, and the escaping piece carries more energy than the original object had. The black hole pays the difference, not the object.

This is not a loophole. It is physics working as advertised, in a place strange enough that "more energy than you started with" turns out to be allowed. That energy has to come from somewhere, and it does: the black hole's own spin. Penrose worked out the math with his student Roy Floyd two years later, in 1971.

Do this enough times, and a black hole spinning as fast as physics allows can give up 29% of its total mass-energy. That figure comes from a Penn State University astronomy course built around this exact result. After that, the black hole is still there. It has run out of spin to give.

Somewhere, a physicist sat down and did the arithmetic. It confirmed you can get more out than you put in, as long as the thing you rob is a black hole and not your car battery.

Why Does Splitting Something Near A Black Hole Produce Free Energy?

The trick behind the Penrose process is a quirk of the ergosphere. Inside it, and only inside it, an object can carry negative energy. That is as measured by someone watching from far away.

That sounds like nonsense. But energy only makes sense relative to something else. Deep in the ergosphere, the dragging of space turns so violent that the usual rules bend. Orbits with negative total energy become possible. That is the quirk Penrose spotted in 1969. Nothing with negative energy can escape on its own. It has to fall into the black hole. But split a falling object in two first, and one piece can carry that negative energy inward. The other piece, to balance the books, is left carrying more energy than the pair started with. That piece is free to leave.

Total energy never breaks its own rules here. The black hole's energy account drops by what the escaping piece gained. A spinning black hole is, in this sense, a huge, patient battery. The Penrose process is the only known way to plug straight into it.

This same pattern shows up for waves too: "negative energy in, extra energy out," not the particle-splitting itself. In 1971, Soviet physicist Yakov Zel'dovich studied a wave bouncing off a spinning, absorbing object. He showed it gets amplified once the object spins fast enough. He wrote down the exact condition:

ω − ℓΩ < 0

Here, ω (omega) is the wave's frequency. Ω (capital omega) is the spin rate. And ℓ (ell) is the wave's twistiness number, formally its angular momentum number. Push the spin rate high enough, and the whole left side turns negative. The wave stops losing energy to the object. It starts gaining energy instead. Physicists call this superradiance. A black hole's ergosphere runs the same rule. It drags space hard enough to flip the sign for anything twisted the right way that wanders in.

Has Anyone Actually Caught A Wave Stealing Energy From Something Spinning?

Yes. Twice, before CUNY ever built its ring.

In 2020, a team working between Glasgow and the University of Arizona spun a foam disc fast and fired twisted sound waves at it. Once the disc's spin passed the Zel'dovich threshold, the sound came back louder than it went in. That was the first experimental test of Zel'dovich amplification, the version of the effect where the wave takes its energy from a spinning absorber. It used ordinary sound instead of light.

In 2024, the same idea moved to real electromagnetic waves. Researchers wrapped a coil around an aluminum cylinder just 4 centimeters across. Then they spun it inside an oscillating magnetic field. Below the Zel'dovich threshold, the spinning metal absorbed energy from the field. It behaved the way a motor's brake pad would. Cross the threshold, and the cylinder's electrical resistance flipped negative. It was now adding power to the circuit instead of draining it, just as Zel'dovich predicted decades earlier. A block of spinning metal, running a black hole's oldest trick on a lab bench.

Both experiments needed something to physically spin, and fast. That is where CUNY's ring breaks the pattern.

How Did CUNY Physicists Fake Rotation Without Spinning Anything?

Here is the part that sounds impossible. The CUNY device never spins. Not slowly. Not fast. Not at all. It is a ring of electronic resonators bolted to a bench. Nothing in it has ever moved a millimeter.

Instead, the team retuned each resonator's properties one after another. The sequence was timed tight, to sweep around the ring. No resonator moved. But the pattern of retuning did, racing around the loop faster than any resonator could. An incoming radio wave cannot tell the difference. All a wave can sense is how properties around it change over time and position. It cannot sense whether an object physically moved to cause that change. So the wave reacts as if the ring were truly spinning.

The physicists gave this a name: synthetic rotation. The thing doing the "spinning" is a pattern of switches, not a physical object. So it is free to move faster than light. That breaks no law of physics. Nothing with mass, and no information, travels that fast, only the timing of a signal already there. Push the synthetic spin rate past the Zel'dovich threshold. The ring stops absorbing radio waves the normal way. It starts amplifying them instead, for a gain of 7.8 decibels. That is the six-fold power boost from the top of this article. A device with a permanent alibi for never having moved produced it.

Is This Actually Free Energy?

No. This needs saying directly. Perpetual-motion inventors have chased "amplifies without moving" since the 1700s.

The ring's resonators still need power to be switched. A stage light needs power too, even when the only thing "moving" is which bulb is lit. Nothing here produces more energy than went into the whole system. That means the resonators, the switching circuits, all of it. The experiment does not reveal a new source of energy. It reveals a new route instead. Energy already riding a wave turns into more wave. That route runs through the same thermodynamic loophole Zel'dovich spotted decades ago. It opens for anything, spinning or synthetically spinning, that crosses his threshold.

The black hole version keeps the same honesty built in. Nobody gets energy for free. The escaping particle's bonus comes straight out of the black hole's own spin. The spin drops by that much. Extract enough of it, and the black hole runs out of spin to sell.

So, How Do You Extract Energy From A Black Hole Using A Device That Never Spins?

Start with the fact that a spinning black hole drags space around it. That drag is strong enough to force everything nearby into motion. This happens in the region just outside its event horizon, the ergosphere. Inside that region, and only there, negative energy becomes possible.

Split something in two there. One half falls in. The other escapes with a real energy bonus, paid for by the black hole's own spin.

Roger Penrose worked out that trick in 1969. Yakov Zel'dovich showed something two years later. The same bonus applies to ordinary waves bouncing off anything spinning fast enough. No event horizon required.

CUNY physicists exploited that last part. A wave never actually needs a spinning object, real or otherwise. It only needs to be fooled into believing one is there. The team retuned a static ring of resonators in a traveling, timed sequence. The ring never moved. It still crossed the Zel'dovich threshold anyway. Out the other side came a signal 7.8 decibels stronger than the one that went in.

No black hole was harmed, or even located, in making that result happen. Somewhere out there, a real one keeps spinning anyway. It drags space around itself hard enough to make this whole trick possible. And it slowly pays the price in stolen spin.