NASA has created a visualization of what it would be like to fly through the event horizon of a black hole, the agency announced Tuesday.
The simulation was posted to YouTube and includes several videos: one in which an observer just misses the “point of no return,” one in which the viewer plunges into the depths of the event horizon, explainer videos, and a 360-degree experience.
The black hole that appears in the simulation is “4.3 million times the mass of our Sun,” according to NASA, making it the same mass as the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “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.”
The black hole is surrounded by a ring of light, known as the accretion disc, which represents material caught in the gravitational pull of the stellar phenomenon and that has been flattened into a disc. The material very slowly orbits the black hole and produces an optical illusion.
“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.”
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NASA said simulating the experience of falling into a supermassive black hole required 10 terabytes of data, which it says is equivalent to “half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress.” The process took about five days using NASA’s computers — the agency estimated the same video produced on an average laptop would take more than 10 years of processing time.
Any object falling into a black hole would be subject to “spaghettification,” in which the powerful gravitational forces of the stellar body stretch the form into a long strand until it eventually falls into the black hole’s singularity, “where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.”
