Famously, light cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, leaving astrophysicists to theorize and speculate about what it is like beyond the limits of humanity. perception. Now, NASA researchers take that theorizing a step further, in the form of an animation that takes you (the viewer) into the black hole.
Miura 1, the first Spanish rocket
Black holes are some of the densest objects in the universe. Light cannot escape their event horizons because the gravitational pull of the holes is so intense. At the edge of the black hole is its accretion disk, that bright yellow-orange swirl of superheated material that the black hole has. attracted to its neighborhoods. Occasionally, pieces of the accretion disk fall into the black hole, causing visible sprouts that astronomers can observe and document.
NASA Black Hole Visualization
His first view of the imagined center of a black hole may have been the climactic scene in Interstellar, when Matt McConaughey’s character plunges into the inky black there. The new animation doesn’t feature any Hollywood stars; The main character in it is a supermassive black hole, 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun.
“I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera (a stand-in for a daring astronaut) simply misses the event horizon and shoots backwards. and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In an agency release.
Although we can see black holes: the Event Horizon Telescope first observed the shadow in 2019, and followed with a image of the black hole in the center of our own galaxy in 2022 – they are very difficult to image, so computer simulations offer astrophysicists a better look at the complicated physics. That happens when you approach such a gravitational giant.
According to the statement, a normal laptop would have taken more than a decade to render the animation, but NASA’s Discover Goddard supercomputer completed the task in five days, using just 0.3% of its processing power.
The viewing begins with the camera about 400 million miles from the black hole, the statement noted, and as the viewer gets closer to the object, everything in view becomes more and more distorted as space-time is warped by the black hole. Once he crosses, he is swept into oblivion, or spaghetti—in less than 13 seconds, Schnittman said.
With “Tidal Force” by Thomas Daniel Bellingham, “Memories” by Digital Juice and “Path Finder” by Eric Jacobson and Lorenzo Castellarin, music meets the moment. The tunes sound like Daft Punk, Hans Zimmer, and the Runescape soundtrack composers got together for one last dance.
The statement added that from the spaghetti point, the viewer only has to travel 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to reach the singularity at the center of the black hole, a journey through the black hole that occurs almost instantaneously.
Further: Capture the size of a black hole in this new NASA animation
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