What would you see if you fell into a black hole? NASA simulation
If you’ve ever wondered what you would see if you fell into a black hole, you may get an idea of how the experience would go through NASA’s simulations.
What would it be like to enter a colossal black hole whose mass is 4.3 million times greater than that of the Sun? Difficult as it may be to imagine, this is precisely the theme of a new NASA project. The space agency has created a series of simulations that allow you to view the interior of a black hole in 360º through YouTube.
A team of researchers used the Discover supercomputer from the NASA Climate Simulation Center, which has handled around 10 terabytes of information. It took about five days using only 0.3% of its 129,000 processors, a procedure that would take more than a decade on a conventional laptop.
“People regularly ask me about this. Simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the true consequences in the real universe,” said astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman, who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Center, the body responsible for the project.
“Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to 20 solar masses, have a smaller event horizon and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before reaching the horizon.” .
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NASA simulations show journey inside a black hole
The simulation of the event horizon of the black hole expands over 25 million kilometers, or about 17% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The gaseous disk that surrounds the structure serves as a reference during the fall, as do bright bodies known as photon rings, which form near the black hole from light that it has orbited one or more times. The starry background has been reproduced as seen on Earth and used to complete the scene.
As the camera approaches the black hole, it reaches a speed increasingly closer to that of light itself. The brightness of the disk and the background of the stars is amplified and the light appears even brighter and more whitish.
The film begins with the camera located 640 million kilometers away and approaches the black hole, whose disk, photon rings and background become distorted. In real time, it takes three hours for the camera to fall toward the event and execute two full 30-minute orbits.
However, anyone observing it from afar would never reach that point, because when space-time is distorted the camera slows down and the image appears to freeze. That’s why the original astronomers referred to black holes as frozen stars.
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“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its spaghettization destruction occurs in just 12.8 seconds,” Schnittman said.
From that moment there are only 180,000 kilometers left to reach the singularity or the black hole’s center. This is a one-dimensional point where the laws of physics as we know them will be suspended.
The other possibility that arises is that the camera orbits near the event horizon, but never crosses it and avoids it at the last moment.