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black holes, these mysterious places in space where the gravity is so strong that even light can’t get out makes for great movie plot twists. But Hollywood aside, there’s a lot people don’t understand about the black hole. A new video from NASA tries to show what it looks like when an object crosses the event horizon or boundary of a black hole. Since no technology can live up to this experience, this may be as close as we’ll ever get.
The video, created by NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman and Brian Powell, begins with a view from a camera floating toward a black hole. As the camera zooms in, it circles the black hole before the camera flies into the burning gas surrounding it. It provides a great view of some photon rings before entering the event horizon. From there, the camera experiences stretching and distortion, colorfully known as spaghettification, as it is pulled into the black hole. As the camera sucks, the simulated sky shrinks. A moment later, the camera fades to black as it enters the singularity, the one-dimensional center of a black hole where the laws of physics cease to exist.
The simulation is then replayed, but with explanations overlaid to explain each step of the process. The video is then played a third time, now in slow motion, and zoomed in to show the intricacies of the layers of the photon ring. It concludes with a final iteration of the entire simulation, but this time with more technical details about how it was created. In general, the simulation is much more detailed than images we have of the Milky Way black hole.
It’s quite a journey and produces some truly striking images, especially those of the layers of the photon ring and the sky, which quickly shrinks when the camera is pulled away.
Schnittman also produced a second video simulating the camera making several laps around the black hole before safely escaping. This one is a 360 degree YouTube videoallowing viewers to look around and see the entire journey from different angles.
The simulated black hole is huge
The black hole in the simulation is about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers) in diameter. It is much larger than Earth and comparable to some black holes in our own cosmic yard.
In case you also want to fly in a Black holeSchnittman has some advice.
“If you have a choice, you want to go into a supermassive black hole,” he said. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces that can tear apart approaching objects before they reach the horizon.”
In short, if you chose a small black hole in this hypothetical situation, you might be torn to shreds before you get to the good stuff. Supermassive black holes seems to be the right way.
Thanks, NASA’s Discover supercomputer
The simulation was created using NASA’s Discover supercomputer, which is located at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The project generated approximately 10 terabytes of data, which NASA says is equivalent to roughly half of the estimated textual content in the Library of Congress.
It took about five days to complete and used only 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 CPUs. NASA says the same job would take about a decade on a regular laptop.
Why work on such a vast and comprehensive black hole simulation? Schnittman says it’s mostly for research.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” Schnittman said in post on the NASA website. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera—a stand-in for a brave astronaut—just missed the event horizon and shot back, and one where it crossed the border, sealing its fate.”
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