Outlook Web Desk
Ever wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole? NASA has been able to make a virtual tour of that available to us with a immersive visualisation produced on a 'supercomputer'
Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, created the visualisations. Schnittman teamed up with fellow Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer
Produced on a NASA supercomputer, the simulation tracks a camera as it approaches, briefly orbits, and then crosses the event horizon — the point of no return — of a monster black hole much like the one at the center of our galaxy
Schnittman 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.
The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. The simulated black hole’s event horizon spans about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), or about 17% of the distance from Earth to the Sun, NASA said
"A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during the fall," NASA said
As per NASA, Black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects, much studied but not fully understood. These objects aren’t really holes, NASA says, adding that they’re huge concentrations of matter packed into very tiny spaces
A black hole is so dense that gravity just beneath its surface, the event horizon, is strong enough that nothing – not even light – can escape