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NASA created the intense and confusing video using a supercomputer and said it would have taken more than a decade for a regular laptop to accomplish the same feat.
NASA has released a video for anyone curious about what would – most likely – happen if you fell into a black hole.
The simulation was created on a NASA supercomputer and tracks a camera as it approaches and crosses the event horizon – the point of no return – of a black hole. This particular black hole is designed to simulate a supermassive black hole – 4.3m times the mass of our sun – which is similar in size to the massive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.
As you might expect, plunging into a black hole in reality would probably not be an enjoyable experience – the intense gravity would likely stretch out an individual in a process known as ‘spaghettification’. But Dr Jeremy Schnittman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that if you had to choose one to enter, a supermassive black hole would be the best choice.
“Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon,” said Schnittman, who created the simulations.
The simulated video shows the various fascinating elements of black holes and their impact on gravity and light around them. Once the camera approaches the event horizon, both the camera itself and the space-time in which it’s moving rush toward the black hole’s centre — also known as the singularity – where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.
The simulation also shows light bending in weird directions as the camera goes deeper into the black hole, as the intense levels of gravity cause confusing effects on light and space-time.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” Schnittman said. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera – a stand-in for a daring astronaut – just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”
To make these simulations, NASA said the project generated roughly 10 TB of data – equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the US Library of Congress – and took about five days running on a tiny portion of a supercomputer’s processors. The agency said the same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.
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