A NASA supercomputer has produced a new immersive visualization that allows us to enter the event horizon, the point of no return of a black hole.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with real consequences in the real universe“Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who created the visualizations, said in a statement. “So I simulated two different scenariosone in which a camera, a stand-in for a daring astronaut, simply misses the event horizon and ejects, sealing its fate.”
The visualizations are available in multiple forms. The explainer videos act as tour guides, illuminating the strange effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Versions rendered as 360-degree videos allow viewers to look around during the ride, while Others are reproduced as flat maps of the entire sky.
To create the visualizations, Schnittman teamed up with Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data (equivalent to about half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress) and It took about five days to run at only 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.
destiny is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our sunequivalent to the monster located in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar mass black holes, which They contain up to about 30 solar masseshave much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon.”
This occurs because the gravitational attraction at the end of an object closest to the black hole is much stronger than that at the other end. Falling objects stretch like noodlesa process that astrophysicists call spaghettification.
The event horizon of the simulated black hole spans about 25 million kilometers, or about 17% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called accretion disk It surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during the fall. The same goes for the bright structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene.
As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching speeds increasingly closer to those of light itselfthe brightness of the accretion disk and background stars is amplified much like the pitch of the sound of an approaching race car is increased. Its light seems brighter and whiter when looking in the direction of travel.
The movies They start with the camera located 640 million kilometers away, and the black hole quickly fills the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and night sky become increasingly distorted, even forming multiple images as its light passes through the increasingly warped spacetime.
In real time, the camera takes a few 3 hours to fall to the event horizon, executing nearly two full 30-minute orbits along the way. But for anyone watching from afar, I would never get there. As spacetime distorts closer and closer to the horizon, the camera image would slow down and then appear to freeze just below it. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as “frozen stars”.
On the event horizon, even space-time itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside, both the camera and the space-time in which it moves rush towards the center of the black hole, a one-dimensional point called a singularitywhere the laws of physics as we know them stop operating.
“Once the camera crosses the horizon, Your spaghettification destruction is only 12.8 seconds away“said Schnittman. From there, it is only 128,000 kilometers to the singularity. This last leg of the journey ends in the blink of an eye.
In the alternative scenario, the camera orbits near the event horizon but never crosses it and escapes to safety. If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this six-hour round trip while his colleagues on a mothership stayed away from the black hole, would return 36 minutes younger than his colleagues. This is because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving near the speed of light.
“This situation may even be more extreme“Schnittman noted. “If the black hole were spinning rapidlylike the one shown in the 2014 film Interstellar, I would return many years younger than his fellow missionaries.
