Cosimo Bambi proposes gram‑size probe to explore a nearby black hole

Physicist Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai has outlined a concept for sending a gram‑size spacecraft to a stellar‑mass black hole within the Milky Way. In a pre‑print paper, Bambi notes that the galaxy likely hosts around 100 million such black holes, most of them isolated and invisible. He estimates that one could exist as close as 20–25 light‑years from Earth, posing no threat but offering a feasible target for a probe that could be launched and reach the object within a human lifetime. Detection would rely on observing low‑level radiation emitted as the black hole accretes gas while moving through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a signal that existing multi‑wavelength astronomical surveys might capture.