Astronomy enthusiasts no longer need to turn to film Interstellar by Christopher Nolan to have a visual approach to a supermassive black hole. NASA has just revealed two computer simulations, created from available scientific data, to understand what someone would see on that abysmal horizon.
The stunning animations were created by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “People often ask questions about this, and finding similarities between these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to the consequences in the real universe,” he explained.
To create the stunning videos, the technical team used the Discover supercomputer, where about 10 terabytes of data were processed. The simulation took five days to run; and used 0.3% of the computer capacity at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. According to the researchers, it would take a conventional computer 10 years to reach the same result.
What would you see in the center of a black hole?
Schnittman explains that it started from a supposed supermassive black hole with 4.3 million solar masses. This would be an approximate size of Sagittarius A*, the gravitational structure found at the center of the Milky Way. It also included a hypothetical spacecraft, capable of withstanding the forces of the hole, which approaches the center from a distance of 640 million kilometers.
In the trip simulated by NASA, the ship moves in a straight line until it is trapped by the black hole’s gravitational field. From there, the probe begins to “fall” in a spiral, surrounding the object until it reaches the event horizon. This point is considered the “point of no return”. Once matter or light crosses that boundary, it cannot escape the gravitational influence.
