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Black holes also stimulate the imagination of researchers. A new NASA simulation shows what happens when a camera falls into a black hole.
Green Belt – Black holes are among the most fascinating and mysterious celestial objects in our universe. It is no coincidence that it also inspires science fiction – it could happen that people fly into a black hole. In fact, black holes are so far away from Earth that this will become a problem in the near future, but research also loves mind games.
NASA researchers simulate falling into a black hole
NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman and scientist Brian Powell simulated what happens if you fall into a black hole. “People often ask about this,” Schnittman says on NASA’s website. “Simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect relativistic mathematics to actual consequences in the real universe.”
In the simulation, a camera falls into a black hole with the mass of 4.3 million suns, roughly equivalent to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. “If you had the choice, you would want to fall into a massive black hole,” Schnittman explains. “Black holes with stellar masses up to about 30 solar masses have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces that can tear apart approaching objects before they reach the horizon.”
NASA simulation: A camera falling into a black hole – and movies
The simulated black hole's event horizon — the region where nothing can escape the celestial body's gravity — is 25 million kilometers in diameter. Surrounding the event horizon is a flat disk made of hot, glowing gas (called an accretion disk). Near the event horizon there is a luminous structure, photon rings. These glowing disks and rings serve as a reference while simulating a fall into a black hole.
Simulation of falling into a black hole: The speed of the camera reaches almost the speed of light
As the camera approaches the black hole, it reaches nearly the speed of light. The light from the rings and discs appears brighter, almost white. The black hole bends space-time and ensures that the photon rings and accretion disk are distorted and can sometimes be seen multiple times. “Once the camera crosses the horizon, being destroyed by spaghetti is only 12.8 seconds away,” says Schnittman. “From there it is only 128,000 kilometers to the singularity.”
The simulation of falling into the black hole was created on NASA's Discover supercomputer at the NASA Climate Simulation Center. This resulted in 10 terabytes of data. According to NASA, the supercomputer took about five days to create the simulation using 0.3 percent of its processors. However, with a standard laptop, this could take more than a decade, NASA confirms. (unpaid bill)
