The United States Space Agency (NASA) released a video made by a supercomputer showing what it would be like to fall into a Black Hole with a mass 4.3 million times greater than that of Sun.
One of the greatest mysteries in the Universe, the black hole consists of an astronomical object with large concentrations of matter packed into small spaces. Due to its high density, the gravity below its surface, also called the event horizon, is so great that not even light can escape.
The black hole used in the simulation has 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. With so much concentrated material, the gravity generated is capable of tearing an object that comes very close Photograph: NASA/Reproduction
“People often asked me about this (what would it be like to fall into a black hole), and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the consequences in the future. Universe real,” says the visualizations’ creator, Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Schnittman explains that supermassive black holes have a smaller event horizon and a larger tidal force. The last element is related to the difference in gravity between two points.
In the case of a black hole, the gravity pulling the object closer is much greater than that at the other end. The result of this is that the object would be torn apart before it even reached the event horizon.
To create the visualization, Schnittman used a supercomputer from NASA called Discover. On a notebook It would take more than a decade to load the information, while the supercomputer took five days. In the work, the equipment used 0.3% of the total of 139 thousand processors. The project generated 10 terabytes of data
In the simulation, a flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas, called an accretion disk, surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference. The same occurs with bright structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times.
At the beginning of the video, the camera is located 640 million km away, and the black hole soon fills the screen.
The closer it gets, the disk, the photon ring and the starry sky start to distort more and more and even form multiple images. This occurs as its light passes through distorted spacetime.
In real time, the camera it would take three hours to fall to the event horizon. But, for anyone observing the equipment from afar, it would appear that the camera never fell into the black hole. As time and space distort, when approaching the astronomical object, the speed of the camera image would slow down until it freezes. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as frozen stars.
Once inside the hole, the camera directs itself to the center of the astronomical object, where the laws of physics known to humanity cease to exist. But the trip will be short, as in 12.8 seconds the camera will be destroyed by the forces of the black hole.
