by If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you were lucky enough to fall into a black hole, NASA has your answer.
A visualization created on a NASA supercomputer to celebrate the start of black hole week on Monday (May 6) takes the viewer on a one-way journey beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
The outer boundary of this black hole represents the point where light does not even move fast enough to escape the black hole’s gravitational pull. That means the event horizon, marked by a golden ring outside the black hole’s core, is the point of no return beyond which no distant observer can ever retrieve information.
In the second simulation, we are instead jetting around the event horizon, challenging our own notions of time and space.
Related: Record breaker! The Milky Way’s most monstrous stellar mass black hole is a sleeping giant lurking close to Earth (Video)
“People often ask about this, and it helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the actual consequences of the real universe,” creator of the visualization Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
“So, I simulated two different situations, one in which there is a camera – stand-in for a bold astronaut – but the sky misses the event and slingshots back out, and one in which he crosses the border, sealed his fate.”
Falling into a black hole
The black hole we, as an observer of the NASA simulation, are falling into has a mass of about 4.3 times the mass of the sun. So it is a supermassive black hole similar to Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, which is thought to be around this mass. Other supermassive black holes are much more massive, and some are the equivalent of billions of suns.
What’s interesting is that if you have a choice of which black hole to go into, more is better.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a giant black hole,” Schnittman said. “Stellar-mass black holes, containing up to 30 solar masses, have much smaller event spectra and stronger tidal forces, and can tear things apart before they reach the sky.”
Falling towards the black hole’s core, its singularity, the gravitational forces increase to the point that tidal forces are so intense that an object is stretched vertically and squeezed horizontally. This causes that object, be it a star or an astronaut, to become a noodle or “spaghettified”. It is no surprise that this process would kill anyone who experienced it.
The more mass a black hole has, the further from its singularity the event horizon will be located. That means with a supermassive black hole, an astronaut would have a chance to cross the event horizon before they meet their terrible fate.
The simulations begin about 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) from our target as we enter the supermassive black hole at speeds approaching the speed of light. As the black hole fills our view, the light from the surrounding matter becomes more intense.
Closer to our destination, the view of the background stars changes as the gravitational influence of the supermassive black holes on space-time, and thus, light from background sources emerges. Right around the black hole is a ring of light that bends around the black hole due to the great curvature of space created by the black hole with its enormous mass.
Before reaching the event horizon and the photon ring, the astronaut falls onto a flattened cloud of hot and loud gas called an accretion disk, which gradually feeds the black hole. This serves as a reference point for our journey.
The event horizon of this simulated black hole has a width of about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), about 17% of the distance between Earth and the sun.
After a real-time duration of about 3 hours and 30 minutes during two orbits of the black hole, we reach its event horizon. This represents the last point at which any distant observer watching our descent would be able to see us. They would see our image forever on the edge of the event horizon, frozen.
Crossing the event horizon is a one-way trip to the central singularity of the black hole, the infinitesimal point of infinite density at which all the physics of the universe breaks down.
However, we will never succeed. Just 12.8 seconds after crossing the event horizon, we and our spaghetti camera are still 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) from the singularity.
The second video gives us a chance to avoid this fate.
In this simulation, rather than falling into the black hole, we close in on the event horizon but never cross it. This takes us on a six hour round trip around this black hole. If we return to our nearby mothership, the warring effects of the supermassive black hole on space and time will mean that our fellow astronauts will be about 36 minutes older than we are.
“This situation can be more extreme,” said Schnittman. “If the black hole was rotating rapidly, like the one shown in the 2014 movie ‘Interstellar,’ it would return many years younger than its shipmates.”
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The simulations of the journey around the black hole and the fall into it were created using the Discover supercomputer located at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. The supercomputer produced a whopping 10 terabytes of data, which NASA said is equivalent to half the text found in the Library of Congress.
The simulations ran for five days on Discover, which accounted for 0.35 of the supercomputer’s 129,000 processors. It would take a commercial laptop about 10 years to create the same simulations.
Just as the supermassive black hole’s event horizon marks its outer limit, these amazing simulations begin a five-day journey through Black Hole Week that promises to stretch and push our minds (in a good way).
