NASA has just released the simulation of a journey dreamed of by many people since Albert Einstein provided, in 1916, the basis for the scientific understanding of this incomprehensible and unfathomable destination: black holes (BNs). More than forty years later, physicist David Finkeltein would provide the classic definition of “a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape.”
The new immersive visualization, produced on the NASA Climate Simulation Center’s Discover supercomputer, allows the curious, who have always imagined what would happen if they fell into a massive black holemanage to delve into the mysterious event horizon, the boundary in space-time beyond which not even light escapes.
According to Jeremy Schnittman, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, for those people who always ask about the subject, “I simulated two different scenarios: one in which a camera — representing a brave astronaut — narrowly misses the event horizon and is launched back out, and another in which she crosses the border, sealing her fate”, explains the astrophysicist on the space agency’s website.
1st simulation: diving into the black hole
Both simulations begin with the camera located almost 400 million away, traveling at speeds increasingly close to light. Soon, the black hole’s disk, its photon rings, and the night sky itself become more distorted.forming varied images, as light passes through space-time.
As the distortion causes time to pass more slowly for objects closest to the black hole, the camera takes 3 hours to cross the event horizon and complete almost two 30-minute orbits. But, for an outside observer, the camera would never reach the event horizon. In fact, it would appear to freeze before crossing the horizon.
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to ‘dive’ into a massive black hole?Source: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell
Logically, all of this is a simplification of reality, because if it occurred in a real black hole, the camera would disintegrate, even before reaching the event horizon. “As soon as the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by ‘spaghettification’ occurs in just 12.8 seconds,” says Schnittman.
2nd simulation: bypassing the black hole
In the alternative simulation, in which the camera orbits the black hole, but does not enter the event horizon, the astronaut represented there would orbit the space object for 6 hours (according to his time control). But for their colleagues on the mothership, who remained away from the action, time passes faster, and the trip would have lasted 6 hours and 36 minutes.
This happens because, similarly, time passes more slowly when we are close to a strong gravitational source, and when we move close to the speed of light.
However, if the black hole were not the type covered in the simulation, but one that “rotated rapidly, like the one shown in the 2014 film ‘Interstellar'”, ponders Schnittman, the situation could be much more extreme. In this case, our astronaut would return to the ship “many years younger than his companions”, concludes.
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