Since they were discovered, scientists, astrophysicists and even space fans have asked themselves: What’s inside a black hole? How do you cross your event horizon? What happens to the light once we are immense in that deep black hole?
Since it is impossible to know, since These objects in the Universe are very distant from Earth enough to visit them and even if the opportunity existed, there would be no way to get out of there alive, experts from the POT have found some of these answers.
It is a new simulation developed by a supercomputer which came up with the best guess we have of what it would be like to enter a black hole, based on current data.
“People often ask about What is a black hole and what would it be like to enter one. Simulating these processes that are difficult to imagine helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the real consequences in the real Universe,” said the astrophysicist. Jeremy Schnittman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, responsible for this new simulation
“So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera, as if it were a substitute for a daring astronaut, simply fails at the event horizon and is ejected, and another in which it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate,” added the expert.
What are black holes?
Black holes are the densest objects we know of in the Universe. They are so compact that we can only describe them mathematically as a singularity: a one-dimensional point of infinite density.
Its density is so extreme that space-time warps gravitationally in what is effectively a closed sphere around it. Within that sphere, not even light has enough speed to escape.
Regarding the dimensions it can reach, its known limit is the event horizon. In general relativity, the event horizon—or event horizon in its English counterpart—refers to a boundary hypersurface of space-time, such that events occurring on one side of it cannot affect an observer located on the other side. .
The more massive the black hole, the larger the radius of the sphere defined by the event horizon, known as Schwartzschild radius. If the Sun were a black hole, for example, its Schwartzschild radius would be only 2.95 kilometers.
The simulation carried out by NASA experts was a unique development. On a typical laptop, computing this simulation would have taken more than a decade. The Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Goodard Space Flight Center It accomplished the feat in 5 days using just 0.3 percent of its processing power.
At the beginning of the video, a thin inner circle called a photon ring is seen. It is an image produced by light that has orbited the black hole one or more times before escaping. This oval, centered in the camera travel direction, shows the entire simulated sky.
In the simulation, the experts put a camera instead of a person, to imagine what entering the black hole would look like. The speed of the camera makes the light sources directly ahead brighten brightly on their 10-minute plunge toward the event horizon. There, the light of the outer universe still shines, but it can never leave. Microseconds later the chamber is destroyed and reaches the singularity.
In 2019 and 2022, a planetary network of radio observatories called the Event Horizon Telescope produced, respectively, the first images of the giant black holes at the centers of M87 and the Milky Way, revealing a bright ring of hot gas in orbit surrounding a circular zone of darkness.
Any light that crosses the event horizon, the black hole’s point of no return, is trapped forever, and any light that passes near it is redirected by the black hole’s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a “shadow” about twice the size of the black hole’s actual event horizon.
As far as we know, the smallest black holes start with a few five times the mass of the Sun, objects that have formed from the collapsed core of a massive star at the end of its life. These are stellar mass black holes.
Stellar mass black holes have an upper limit of around 65 times the mass of the Sun, because the extremely strong precursor stars that would produce these larger objects end their lives in a pair instability supernova that completely destroys the core, leaving nothing behind to collapse into the black hole.
However, we have seen stellar mass black holes of more than 65 solar masses. They can be formed when black holes collide and merge, resulting in an object with a combined mass. But how do we get from these to the supermassive and ultramassive black holes It’s a big empty space. Quite literal.
There is a curious paucity of detected black holes in the mass range between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. But there are also a wide variety of supermassive black holes.
The black hole at the heart of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), boasts the weight of 4.3 million suns based on long-term tracking of the stars in orbit around it. The diameter of its shadow spans approximately half of Mercury’s orbit in our solar system.
“Since 2015, gravitational wave observatories on Earth have detected black hole mergers with a few dozen solar masses thanks to the small ripples in space-time that these events produce,” said Goddard astrophysicist Ira Thorpe.
“Supermassive black hole mergers will produce waves of much lower frequencies that can be detected using a space observatory millions of times larger than their terrestrial counterparts,” he concluded.
