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New NASA visualizations of a black hole model reveal the dramatic consequences of crossing the event horizon, highlighting severe space-time distortions and possible spaghettification near the singularity. Have
New NASA visualizations of a black hole model reveal the dramatic consequences of crossing the event horizon, highlighting severe space-time distortions and possible spaghettification near the singularity. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you fell into a black hole? Now viewers can immerse themselves in the black hole’s event horizon, the point of no return, thanks to an exciting new visualization created on a NASA supercomputer.
“People often ask this, and modeling these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to real-world consequences in the real universe,” said astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Who created the renders? “So I modeled two different scenarios: One where the camera – a stand-in for the brave astronaut – jumps the event horizon and returns, and the other is where he crosses the line and seals his fate.”
Visualizations are available in various forms. Video explainers serve as guides highlighting the strange implications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Versions played as 360-degree videos allow viewers to look around as they travel, while others play as flat maps of the entire sky.
Schnittman worked with Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Modeling Center to create the visualization. The project produced approximately 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to roughly half the estimated text content at the Library of Congress, and required approximately 5 days of work on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. For a typical laptop this will take over a decade.
The target is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
“If you have a choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar-mass black holes, containing around 30 solar masses, have much shorter event horizons and stronger tidal forces that can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon.”
This is because the gravitational force at the end of the object closer to the black hole is much stronger than at the other end. Falling objects stretch like noodles; This is a process astrophysicists call spaghettification.
The event horizon of the simulated black hole spans approximately 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), or about 17% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. A flat, rotating cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds it and serves as a visual guide as it falls. Also shining are structures called photon rings, which form near the black hole as light orbits around it one or more times. The background of the starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene.
As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching speeds increasingly approaching the speed of light, the glow of the accretion disk and background stars intensifies, almost as intense as an oncoming race car gaining altitude. Its lights appear brighter and whiter when viewed in the direction of traffic.
The movies begin with the camera nearly 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away and the black hole rapidly filling its field of view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and night sky become increasingly distorted, even forming multiple images as their light passes through increasingly distorted space-time.
In real time, the camera takes about 3 hours to descend to the event horizon, making almost two full 30-minute rotations along the way. But no one watching from afar will be able to reach there. As space-time becomes increasingly distorted as it approaches the horizon, the camera image slows down and then appears to freeze. This is why astronomers originally called black holes “frozen stars.”
At the event horizon, spacetime itself is flowing inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside, both the camera and the space-time it moves through rush towards the center of the black hole, a one-dimensional point called the singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them no longer apply.
“When the camera crosses the horizon, it is destroyed by spaghettification in just 12.8 seconds,” Schnittman said. The distance from there to the singularity is only 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers). This last leg of the journey soon ended.
In an alternative scenario, the camera pans close to the event horizon but never crosses the horizon and escapes to safety. If the astronaut had flown the spacecraft during this 6-hour round trip and his colleagues on the mother ship had stayed away from the black hole, he would have returned 36 minutes younger than his colleagues. This is because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when traveling at speeds close to the speed of light.
“This situation could be even more extreme,” Schnittman said. “If the black hole were spinning as fast as shown in the 2014 movie Interstellar, it would return much younger than its companions.”
Source: Port Altele
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