Amazing video shows what you could see when you fall into a black hole

Assuming we can get there and, above all, survive long enough, what would we see crossing the event horizon of a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way? The answer to this question is provided in the form of a film by Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which he and his team created. Two simulations harness the computational power of the Discover supercomputer provided to NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. The project required 5 days of calculations using 0.3% of the supercomputer’s resources, producing 10 terabytes of data.

Using Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity as a basis, the best theory available today capable of describing the effects of gravity, Schnittmann created two simulations, one of An object crosses the event horizon and rushes toward the singularity at the center of the black holeAnd one instead in the case where our imaginary video camera manages to escape the gravitational well after making a number of orbits around the event horizon, which we remember marks the line beyond which space-time becomes so curved that not even a ray of light will escape outward. For the simulation, a non-rotating black hole with a mass 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun was examined, compared to Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Two films were produced for each of the two scenarios, a navigable version that allows the viewer to look at 360 degrees and a “flat” version with Explanations in overlays that explain what is happening. In both films it is possible to see structures such as a ring of photons, created by light rays bent by space-time and orbiting around the event horizon, distorting and doubling the image of the celestial vault, again due to the extreme curvature of space-time near the black hole. In the simulation, the event horizon is 25 million kilometers in diameter, and the virtual camera starts at a distance of 640 million kilometers from the event horizon. In real time, it would take about 3 hours to reach the “edge”, turning around in 30 minutes each.

If for a passenger on board an astronaut the passage of the event horizon would be instantaneous, for a distant observer The hypothetical spaceship, according to predictions of general relativity, will appear to slow down more and more as it approaches the event horizon, until it appears completely still as in the shot, and then slowly becomes less bright until it disappears completely, as the last photons emitted reach us before crossing the event horizon, and slip further and further into the infrared. From the astronaut’s perspective, once it passes the event horizon, in just over 12 seconds, it will be completely “spaghetti” by tidal forces.