What happens if you fall into a black hole? This NASA simulation allows you to see what happens

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created a spectacular simulation that shows a first-person dive into the ‘event horizon’ of a black hole. The stunning visualization, available on YouTube in a 360-degree video, shows the reality-warping journey as it approaches the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, the limit from which nothing, not even light, is able to return. .

“People often ask about this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with real-world consequences.” real universe“Explained Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and author of the simulations, in a NASA statement about the video. “So I simulated two different scenariosone in which a camera, a stand-in for a daring astronaut, simply misses the event horizon and is ejected, and another in which it crosses the line, sealing its fate.”

Journey inside a black hole

Even if you’ve seen the movie “Interstellar” and in it actor Matthew McConaughey dive into a supermassive black hole, you still don’t have a clear idea of ​​what it would be like to encounter one of these terrifying cosmic structures, right?

To see what it would be like to fall into a black hole without suffering spaghettization in realityNASA has given it to us thanks to an incredible new 360° visualization created using the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center, what it would be like to circle a black hole before plunging into the event horizon or surface of no return. The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to about half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress, according to NASA.

(You have the video simulation at the end of this article).

As explained in the NASA video, if this simulation had been carried out on a conventional computer, it would have taken more than a decade to render. To the supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center it took him five days using only 0.3% of its processing power.

The two visualizations are divided into one-minute journeys represented as 360-degree videos that allow viewers to look around them during the journey. Schnittman, who has performed several black hole simulations for NASA, based the new one on a supermassive black hole very similar to Sagittarius A*.

As soon as the simulation begins, the video shows a viewer diving through the accretion disk of glowing gas around a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way, i.e. Sagittarius A*. The viewer spins through the immersion, passing ghostly tracks of light particles that have orbited the black hole several times, and finally comes the moment of the epic finale: the event horizon, where nothing, not even light, can escape. Crushing gravitational forces destroy the observer just 12.8 seconds after passing the event horizon. It’s a 128,000 kilometer journey from the event horizon to the singularity, but it happens in the blink of an eye.

At what point would we fall into the event horizon? The exact point at which this would happen depends on the mass of the black hole involved: stellar mass, or up to about 100 suns mass; or supermassive, from millions to billions of solar masses. The simulated black hole’s event horizon spans about 25 million kilometers, or about 17 percent of the distance between Earth and our Sun.

Once inside the black hole, the viewer rushes towards the one-dimensional center of the black hole called singularitywhere the laws of physics as we know them cease to exist.

According to NASA, the first-person perspective offered by the hypothetical “camera” is enormously accelerated: it can reach 60 percent of the speed of light. The camera would be something like an astronaut’s point of view if we could ever get to a black hole. From the point of view of the doomed chamber, it would take three hours to fall into the event horizon. However, to an outside observer, the chamber would appear to freeze just before the threshold due to the colossal distortions in space-time.

Black holes are fascinating and very complex objects, so visualizations like these bring us closer to many of its peculiarities, such as the fact that our experience of time would also change. You would stay young, as time would slow down due to your speed and its gravity; That is if you were only on a trip in the orbit of the black hole. If we focus on this visualization, the protagonist would be 36 minutes younger.

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