Black holes are considered to be one of the great enigmas of space. Not in vain, we did not have the slightest idea of its existence until just over a century ago. For example, if your body fell into a black hole, what would happen? NASA tries to answer this question with a simulation where it immerses the viewer in the event horizon, the point of no return of a black hole.
What are we gonna see. Two scenarios. In the first, the simulated camera (which acts as a substitute for an astronaut) starts about 640 million kilometers from the black hole and moves towards it. As it approaches, the disk of material around the black hole and an internal structure known as a photon ring become clearer. These elements, and space-time, become more distorted the closer the camera gets. Ultimately, the flight makes nearly two orbits around the black hole before plunging beyond the event horizon and “spaghettizing” (falling objects are stretched out like noodles) after just 12.8 seconds.
In the second scenario, the camera (again, playing the astronaut) approaches the black hole, before escaping the gravitational pull and flying away. In terms of size, the destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In addition, the black hole has an event horizon of 25 million kilometers. Let’s see the first video:
A didactic simulation. What NASA launched a few hours ago is a hypothesis that tries to shed light on that enigmatic finite region of space that Einstein once described in his equations. With this idea, Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, created the visualizations by simulating two different scenarios, one in which a camera (a substitute for an extremely brave astronaut) simply fails to reach the event horizon and exits. shot, and another in which he crosses the boundary, “sealing his fate,” Schnittman explains.
How it was made. To plunge us into the interior of a black hole, Schnittman teamed up with scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. In numbers, the project generated no less than 10 terabytes of data and took around five days to run on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. For perspective, the same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.
Simple definition of black hole. They form from the cores of massive dead stars that collapse under their own gravity, and are so dense that their matter is compressed into a space that is currently indescribable to physics. One result of this compression is an event horizon, a roughly spherical boundary where the pull of gravity is so strong that not even the speed of light is enough to reach escape velocity. And yes, today we have no idea what lies beyond the horizon. Let’s look at the second scenario proposed:
So there’s no way to get out alive if we fall in? In the absence of tangible proof, we would say that it is not the most recommended. It is known, based on the way light and matter move around black holes, that the gravitational regime around the event horizon is absolutely crazy. Therefore, on many occasions anything that gets too close is turned into atoms by the forces involved. The exact point at which this happens will depend on the mass of the black hole.
And the movie scene ‘Interstellar‘? About it, Schnittman says that if you were on the trip only in orbit, you would return younger. On the second viewing, you would be 36 minutes younger than someone who stayed in your starting position, “but this situation may be even more extreme,” he notes. If the black hole were spinning rapidly, like the one shown in the 2014 film, “it would return many years younger than its fellow travelers.”
Image | POT
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