If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole, NASA has your answer.
A visualization created on a NASA supercomputer to celebrate the beginning of black hole week on Monday (May 6) takes the viewer on a one-way plunge beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
This outer boundary of a black hole marks the point at which not even light moves fast enough to escape the black hole’s intense gravitational pull. That means the event horizon, marked by a golden ring outside of the heart of the black hole, is the point of no return past which no distant observer can ever recover information.
In a second simulation, we instead jet around the event horizon, in the process challenging our very notion of time and space.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” creator of the visualizations Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement.
“So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”
Falling into a black hole
The black hole that we, as the viewer of the NASA simulation, are falling into has a mass of around 4.3 times that of the sun. That makes it a supermassive black hole similar to Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, which is estimated to have around this mass. Other supermassive black holes are much more massive, with some equivalent to billions of suns.
What is interesting is that if you have the choice of what black hole to tumble into, bigger is better.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman said. “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…
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