What happens if you fall into a black hole, explained simply in stunning NASA simulation

Black holes are considered one of the greatest mysteries of the cosmos. It’s not for nothing that we had no idea about its existence just over a century ago. For example, if your body falls into a black hole, what will happen? NASA is trying to answer this question with a simulation that plunges the viewer into the event horizon, the point of no return of a black hole.

What will we see? Two scenarios. In the first, a simulated camera (which replaces the astronaut) launches about 640 million kilometers from the black hole and moves towards it. As it gets closer, the disk of material around the black hole and the internal structure known as the photon ring become clearer. These elements, as well as space-time, become more distorted as the camera gets closer. The flight ends up making nearly two orbits around the black hole before, in just 12.8 seconds, it shoots out beyond the event horizon and is “spaghettiized” (falling objects are stretched out like noodles).

In the second scenario, the camera (again playing the astronaut) approaches the black hole before breaking free of its gravitational pull and flying away. In terms of size, the destination is a supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times that of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In addition, the event horizon of a black hole is 25 million kilometers. Let’s watch the first video:

Didactic simulation. What NASA put forward a few hours ago is a hypothesis that tries to shed light on that mysterious finite region of space that Einstein once described in his equations. With this idea in mind, Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, created a visualization by simulating two different scenarios, one in which the camera (a stand-in for an extremely brave astronaut) simply fails to reach the event horizon and goes out of frame. and another in which he crosses the border, “deciding his fate,” Schnittman explains.

How it was done. To take us inside the black hole, Schnittman teamed up with scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Modeling Center. In numbers, the project generated at least 10 terabytes of data and took about five days to run on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. By comparison, on a regular laptop, the same task would take more than ten years.

A simple definition of a black hole. They are formed from the cores of massive dead stars that collapse under their own gravity, and are so dense that their material is compressed into a space that is currently indescribable in terms of physics. One result of this compression is the event horizon, a roughly spherical boundary where the force of gravity is so strong that even the speed of light is not enough to reach escape velocity. And yes, today we have no idea what lies beyond the horizon. Let’s look at the second proposed scenario:

So if we fall, we won’t get out alive? In the absence of real evidence, we would say that this is not the most recommended option. Based on the way light and matter move around black holes, we know that the gravitational regime around the event horizon is completely crazy. Therefore, in many cases, anything that gets too close turns into atoms under the influence of the forces involved. The exact point at which this happens will depend on the mass of the black hole.

And a scene from the movie ‘Interstellar‘? On this point, Schnittman says that if you were only on a trip in orbit, you would come back younger. On a second viewing, you’ll be 36 minutes younger than the one left in your original position, “but this situation could be even more extreme,” he notes. If the black hole were to spin quickly, as depicted in the 2014 film, “it would return many years younger than its companions.”

Image | POT

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