What would it be like to fall into a black hole and live to see it? Since they were discovered, scientists have wondered and have studied what is inside a black hole, what happens to light or what would happen if you come into contact with one. Knowing for sure is complicated, since those who have been identified are too far away to arrive and, if they did, there would be no way to get out alive. Still, thanks to a NASA supercomputer you can experience a Immersive visualization that lets you see what it would be like to step into the ‘event horizon’the point of no return of a black hole, according to current scientific knowledge.
“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“says Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and creator of the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera, as if he were a substitute for a daring astronautit simply fails at the event horizon and shoots out, and another in which it crosses the limit, sealing its fate,” adds the scientist.
The visualizations, which are available on YouTube, explain, as a documentary guide, everything that could be seen, the perceptible effects that are known, the light and the absence of it, as the “camera” that is followed is goes into the black hole. Is about rendered at 360 degrees, so the viewer can look anywhere, to feel the immersion, as if he were entering the black hole himself. 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 a monstrous amount of about 10 terabytes of data and took about five days to run, although on only 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. Getting these videos made on a regular laptop would take more than a decade.
What would happen if it falls in?
The visualization recreates a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our sun. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon,” explains Schnittman. If you fell into a black hole, the phenomenon popularly known as spaghettificationthat is, everything that falls inside would stretch like a noodle due to the enormous gravitational force.
