Stunning NASA visualization takes you inside a black hole

As we know, light cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, leading astrophysicists to theorize and speculate about what it looks like beyond humanity. perception. Now NASA researchers have taken this theory a step further by creating an animation that takes you (the viewer) into a black hole.

Black holes are among the densest objects in the Universe. Light cannot escape event horizons because the gravitational pull of holes is so strong. At the edge of a black hole is its accretion disk, a bright yellow-orange swirl of superheated material that the black hole has. attracted by its surroundings. Sometimes pieces of the accretion disk fall into the black hole, causing visible sprouts which astronomers can observe and document.

His first glimpse of the imaginary center of a black hole may have been the climactic scene in Interstellar, as Matt McConaughey’s character plunges into inky darkness there. There are no Hollywood stars in the new cartoon; its protagonist is a supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun.

“I simulated two different scenarios, in one of which the camera (a stand-in for the brave astronaut) simply missed the event horizon and filmed backwards. and one where he crosses the border, sealing his fate,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. At the agency release.

Although we can see black holes: the Event Horizon telescope first noticed the shadow in 2019 and then image of a black hole in the center our own galaxy in 2022—they’re very difficult to image, so computer simulations are giving astrophysicists a better look at the complex physics. This happens when you get close to such a gravitational giant.

According to the statement, a typical laptop would have taken more than a decade to render the animation, but NASA’s Discover Goddard supercomputer completed the task in five days using just 0.3% of its processing power.

The statement notes that the view begins with the camera approximately 400 million miles away from the black hole, and as the viewer gets closer to the object, everything in view becomes more and more distorted as space-time is distorted by the black hole. As soon as he crosses the road, he will be forgotten, or spaghetti“in less than 13 seconds,” Schnittman said.

“Tidal Force” by Thomas Daniel Bellingham, “Memories” by Digital Juice and “Path Finder” by Eric Jacobson and Lorenzo Castellarina, the music matches the moment. The tunes sound like Daft Punk, Hans Zimmer and the composers of the Runescape soundtrack got together for one last dance.

The statement added that from the spaghetti point, the viewer only needs to travel 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to reach the singularity at the center of the black hole, with travel through the black hole occurring almost instantly.

Further: Capture the size of a black hole in this new NASA animation.