Black holes are cosmic monsters that continue to retain an aura of mystery, so Have you ever thought what would happen if you fell into one? This is the question that NASA asks and it is what has motivated … carried out a fascinating project. Its scientists have created an immersive experience with the Discover supercomputer of the US agency’s Climate Simulation Center. The idea was to recreate the journey of an astronaut briefly orbiting, then crossing the event horizon—the point of no return—of a non-spinning black hole to simplify visualization.
In this case we are talking about a large black hole, 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, which is intended to be similar to the one found in the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius 1. In fact, astronomers, already in 2022, showed us some first images of this heart of the Milky Way, shared in this video.
Go into a black hole
NASA videos act as a tourist guide highlighting the effects of the general theory of relativity of Einstein. It is an exercise in creativity combined with the knowledge we have so far about black holes to create an unusual experience. The images seen in the shape of a disk and the sky in the background are transformed, becoming duplicated or generating hypnotic mirror images.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the real consequences in the real universe,” says Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, on the space agency’s website. NASA Goddard Space Flights in Maryland, and responsible for the visualizations.
For this they were created two different scenarios, “one in which a camera – taking on the role of what an astronaut would see – simply does not reach the event horizon and is ejected, and another in which it crosses the limit, sealing its fate.” In this way, Schnitmann together with the scientist Brian Powell invested some five days to finish them, when just a few years ago, with the technology available, it would have taken a decade.
Schittman explains that if you have the option, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole, «Stellar mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, that is, gravitational forces, that can destroy objects that approach before they reach the horizon…Falling objects spread out like noodles, a process that astrophysicists call spaghettification“, it states.
What you can see
The black hole’s event horizon is about 25 million kilometers, which is almost equivalent to 17% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. And a flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called accretion disk, which is the orange structure – surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during entry. “The same goes for the bright structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it several times. A backdrop of the starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene,” NASA details in a statement.
The closer to the black hole we have speeds close to those of light, the brightness of the accretion disk and the stars in the background increase in the same way that if we thought about the sound of a racing car approaching it would be amplified. With a bright white light. “Images multiply or distort when light passes through an increasingly deformed space-time,” the experts detail.
The agency highlights that in real time, it takes about three hours for the camera to fall to the event horizon. But for anyone who FIf you witnessed this from afar, you would never get there. «As space-time distorts closer to the horizon, the image would slow down and then it would seem to freeze. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as ‘frozen stars,'” NASA explains.
Once inside, the camera and the space-time in which it moves They are rushing towards the center of the black hole, a one-dimensional point called the singularity, “where the laws of physics as we know them stop operating,” they say.
Schnittman establishes that when the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction, by what we have previously called spaghettification, is only 12.8 seconds away. From there, it is only 128,000 kilometers to the singularity and everything fades into black.
Escape from a black hole
In another scenario, the camera orbits the event horizon, but never crosses it. Structures in the direction of travel, in the center of the simulation, brighten brightly as speed increases. At 46 seconds, the camera moves closer to the event horizon, reaching 60% of the speed of light.
Video.
video about the scenario in which one flies around a black hole
pot
“If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this six-hour round trip, while his colleagues on a mothership stayed away from the black hole, he would return 36 minutes younger than his colleagues,” notes NASA. Because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving near the speed of light.
This is what Schnittman tries to explain and says that “if the black hole were spinning rapidly, like the one shown in the movie ‘Interstellar’ – the daring astronaut – would return many years younger than his crewmates.
