A NASA simulation shows what it would be like to fall into a black hole – and it might not be exactly how you expect.
I don’t know about you lot, but when I was in school, we all seemed to go through this phase of having an irrational fear of black holes.
For some reason, plenty of us seemed convinced one was going to swallow us all up. Perhaps the whole idea that 2012 was going to be the end of the world had something to do with it… how far we’ve come.
But we’d have chats about what it might feel like as we woke up from nightmares of falling into a black hole.
And perhaps it’s something you’re still scared of now. In which case, this terrifying simulation from NASA probably won’t help.
It’s not exactly a dream scenario (NASA)
User AstroKobi shares educational videos on YouTube and featured the science clip on his account.
He explains how the video zooms in, you can see the ‘event horizon’ of the black hole. This is essentially the ‘point of no return’, aka the boundary where the escape velocity equals the speed of light.
“If you pass beyond that black barrier, there is no coming back,” the user stresses.
He goes on to explain that the black hole used is ‘4.3 million times more massive than our sun’.
“To create a simulation this detailed, it took NASA’s supercomputers five days,” AstroKobi explains, “and generated over 10 terabytes of data.
“It would take your laptop more than a decade to complete.”
The simulation shows that as you get closer to the black hole, time starts to slow down, with the effect getting stronger as keep closing in.
What is a few seconds for you, ‘becomes a few hours for everybody else’ watching you from outside of it.
AstroKobi explains: “Time and space appear to warp as you circle the event horizon, getting closer and closer until you hit it.
“The light of the universe fades away and within a few milliseconds, you become one with the black hole’s singularity.”
Once you’re past the event horizon, there’s no going back (NASA)
The user continues to narrate that to an observer from the outside of the black hole, ‘you would have just frozen on the event horizon’ and faded away slowly from existence.
Scary, right? I can already feel those nightmares coming back tonight as I imagine myself in the NASA simulation, slowly and slowly tumbling through the black hole until I suddenly disappear.
Great.
Featured Image Credit: NASA
Jess Battison
NASA’s first-person simulation shows what it would be like falling into a black hole
The highly detailed simulation reveals how light changes when you get sucked in to a black hole
We’ve all heard about the possibility at school or through films, getting sucked into a black hole would be one of the most torturous and painful deaths in the universe.
But there’s so much more to be known about black holes, seeing as we only captured our first photo of one about five years ago.
Several will wonder what it’s actually like to fall into one, if it’s as bad as it sounds, and how it looks.
Well, count on NASA to take advantage of technology to put together a highly advanced simulation of the process:
This brand new animation, which was uploaded to YouTube yesterday (6 May), showcases exactly how terrifying it would be to fall into the dark abyss of a black hole.
The highly advanced video took just five days to put together on just 0.3 percent of the 129,000 processors that are part of NASA’s Discover supercomputer, located at the NASA centre for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland.
A regular laptop would have taken over 10 years to go through the same process, as over 10 terabytes of data would have needed to be processed.
In the video, we approach a supermassive black hole that has a mass 4.3 million times greater than our Sun, comparative with the colossal black hole located in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
The simulation was incredibly detailed. (NASA)
The event horizon (aka the point of no return) spans approximately 16 million miles, or around 17 percent of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Physics professor at the University of Sussex, Xavier Calmet, said that the gravitational force of a black hole would become so intense that we would experience something called ‘spaghettification’.
“Your body will be stretched into a shape similar to that of a long pasta until it is reaped apart by the strong gravitational force,” he told The Daily Mail.
Sounds lovely.
The space agency further explained the video: “This new, immersive visualisation produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out.”
At the start of the video, we approach the void, seeing the bright orange ‘accretion disk’, which is a hot disk of gas that orbits the black hole, acting as its main source of light.
It’s made up of various material that emits energy, as it falls into the black hole, whether it’s gas, dust or matter – also seen is the thinner proton sphere, a thin ring of light formed near the black hole’s event horizon.
As we enter the black hole, we begin to spin as all light around us looks like it’s bending as we move further and further from any trace of light for eternity.
Everything looks warped and becomes distant once you get sucked in. (NASA)
NASA say that the video is largely sped up, reacting about 60 percent the speed of light to show the process in just about a minute – with the viewpoint meant to represent the perspective of an astronaut if humans were ever able to reach a black hole.
Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, explained: “If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole.
“Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.”
