2024-05-09 03:21:00
Black holes also stimulate the imagination of researchers. A new NASA simulation shows what happens when a camera falls into a black hole.
Greenbelt – Black holes are among the most fascinating and mysterious celestial bodies in our universe. It’s not for nothing that they also inspire science fiction – in which it can happen that people fly into a black hole. In fact, black holes are far too far away from Earth for this to become an issue in the near future, but research also likes 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 it,” says Schnittman on the NASA website and continues: “Simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity with the actual consequences in the real universe.”
In the simulation, a camera falls into a black hole that has the mass of 4.3 million suns, roughly equivalent to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. “If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” explains Schnittman. “Black holes with stellar masses up to about 30 solar masses have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces that can tear up approaching objects before they reach the horizon.”
NASA simulation: camera falls into a black hole – and films
The event horizon of the simulated black hole – the region from which nothing can escape the celestial body’s gravity – has an unimaginable diameter of 25 million kilometers. A flat disk made of hot, glowing gas (called the accretion disk) surrounds the event horizon. A little closer to the event horizon is a luminous structure, the photon rings. These glowing disks and rings serve as a reference during the simulated fall into the black hole.
Image from the NASA simulation: a camera falls into a black hole. This distorts spacetime and thus also the view of the accretion disk surrounding the black hole. © NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell
Simulated fall into a black hole: camera reaches almost the speed of light
As the camera approaches the black hole, it reaches almost the speed of light. The light from the rings and disks appears brighter, almost white. The black hole bends space-time and ensures that the photon rings and the accretion disk are distorted and can sometimes be seen multiple times. “Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is only 12.8 seconds away,” says Schnittman. “From there it’s only 128,000 kilometers to the singularity.”
The simulation of the fall into the black hole was created on the NASA supercomputer “Discover” at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. This resulted in 10 terabytes of data. According to NASA, the supercomputer took around five days to create the simulation using 0.3 percent of its processors. With a standard laptop, however, this would take more than a decade, emphasizes NASA. (tab)
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