NASA supercomputer recreates journey to black hole

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to travel to a black hole, NASA can help you answer that question with the help of the Discover supercomputer.

Thanks to this technology, the US space agency was able to recreate the accretion disk and rings of photons surrounding the black hole. In fact, in the 360° video you can see these structures spinning in an almost hypnotic manner amidst the vastness of the universe.

This video, similar to a tourist guide to the hole, attempts to recreate a fictional scenario in which an astronaut fails to complete his mission and arrives at this location in outer space.According to Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who created the visualization.

To develop the visualizations, Schnittman collaborated with Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer located at NASA’s Climate Modeling Center.

The project produced about 10 terabytes of data (equivalent to about half the estimated text content of the US Library of Congress) and required about five days of processing, using just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. Completing the same task on a regular laptop would take more than ten years.

Following Schnittman’s fictional scenario, the missing astronaut’s destination is a supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun.

As the camera approaches the black hole, its speed increases until it approaches the speed of light. The brightness of the accretion disk and distant stars increases.

In real time, the camera spends about 3 hours descending towards the event horizon, making almost two full 30-minute loops along the way. However, to a distant observer, it may appear that the camera never reaches this horizon.

A black hole is a kind of point in space where a lot of matter has accumulated in a very, very small space. Imagine crushing a giant object, such as a mountain, until it is the size of a marble.

This compression makes its gravity extremely strong. Gravity is the force that holds everything on earth; In a black hole, this force is so powerful that not even light can escape it.

This means that if light, the fastest light we know of, can’t get out, nothing can. That’s why we call it “black” because it’s completely dark.

Black holes can form when a very large star dies. At the end of its life, if the star is massive enough, it can collapse under its own gravity and form a black hole. These are truly mysterious objects because they are invisible.

We can’t see them directly, but we know they exist by the way they affect things around them. For example, if something gets too close to a black hole, such as a star, the black hole may start to eat it.

As a star decays, some of its material spins around the black hole very quickly and becomes very hot, emitting great brightness. So, although we can’t see the black hole, we can see its glow.

Black holes play a crucial role in our understanding of General Relativity, the theory proposed by Albert Einstein that describes how gravity works.

Einstein predicted the existence of black holes as part of his theory, which describes how massive objects in space, such as planets and stars, bend space-time around them.