Amazing visualization shows the inside of a black hole – DW – 05/14/2024

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to enter a black hole, those abysses of space where the force of gravity is so overwhelming that not even light can escape? Of course, no human can do this, at least not in the foreseeable future. However, for those interested in the mysteries of the Universe, NASA is offering a glimpse of this incomprehensible spectacle through a new 360° visualization.

Imagine orbiting a black hole just before it is swallowed up by the event horizon, that limit from which nothing comes back. An experience that cannot be reproduced in reality is recreated thanks to simulation technologies because, in fact, no real technology can survive such a collision.

“People ask about this often, and modeling these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to real-world consequences in the real universe,” says Jeremy Schnittman, Ph.D. an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who authored these visualizations.

Schnittman describes two hypothetical scenarios: one in which the camera, instead of the intrepid astronaut, escapes the event horizon and is catapulted back into space, and another in which it crosses that boundary, sealing its fate in the void of space.

Along with Brian Powell, another Goddard Center scientist, Schnittman used the Discover supercomputer for the project, which processed about 10 terabytes of data while consuming just 0.3% of its power over five days. According to NASA, this task would take more than ten years on a conventional computer.

Black holes: two different scenarios

One of the videos simulates a journey to Sagittarius A*, the colossal black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The camera zooms in, orbits, and finally plunges into the event horizon, revealing a phenomenon known as spaghettization, where a massive distortion of space and time stretches everything around it. As the camera is sucked in, the simulated sky collapses, and moments later the camera goes dark, colliding with a singularity, the one-dimensional center of a black hole where the laws of classical physics cease to exist.

The second video suggests an escape route where the camera circles the horizon but never crosses it, completing a six-hour orbit. Upon return, thanks to time distortions caused by the supermassive black hole, the astronauts will find that they have aged 36 minutes more than the observer.

“This situation could be even more extreme,” Schnittman says. “If a black hole were spinning rapidly, as shown in the 2014 film Interstellarhe will return many years younger than his comrades.

Sagittarius A* has the mass of 4.3 million suns and an event horizon 25 million kilometers in diameter. In the visualization, the black hole attacks from an initial distance of 640 million kilometers.

“If you have to choose, it’s better to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman warns. “Black holes of much smaller stellar mass would tear apart any object before reaching the horizon due to their powerful tidal forces.”

Felipe Espinosa Wang with information from NASA, Space.com and CNET.