This is what a black hole looks like: a NASA supercomputer made it possible | VIDEO

A supercomputer POT has produced a new immersive visualization that allows us to delve into the event horizon, the point of no return of a black hole.

“People often ask about this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to real-world consequences in the real universe,” Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. NASA, who created the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera, a stand-in for a daring astronaut, simply misses the event horizon and ejects, and another in which it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”

Visualizations are available in multiple forms. The explainer videos act as tour guides, illuminating the strange effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Versions rendered as 360-degree videos allow viewers to look around during the ride, while others play as flat maps of the entire sky.

To create the visualizations, Schnittman teamed up with Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data (equivalent to about half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress) and took about five days to run on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.

The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon.”

This occurs because the gravitational pull at the end of an object closest to the black hole is much stronger than that at the other end. Falling objects stretch out like noodles, a process astrophysicists call spaghettification.

The simulated black hole’s event horizon spans about 25 million kilometers, or about 17% of the distance between Earth and the Sun. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds it and serves as a reference. visual during the fall. The same goes for bright structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene.

As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching speeds closer and closer to that of light itself, the brightness of the accretion disk and the stars in the background is amplified in much the same way as the pitch of a sound increases. approaching racing car. Its light appears brighter and whiter when looking in the direction of travel.

The movies begin with the camera located 640 million kilometers away, and the black hole quickly fills the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and night sky become increasingly distorted, even forming multiple images as its light passes through the increasingly warped spacetime.

In real time, it takes the camera about 3 hours to fall to the event horizon, executing almost two full 30-minute orbits along the way. But for anyone watching from afar, they would never get there. As spacetime distorts closer and closer to the horizon, the camera image would slow down and then appear to freeze just below it. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as “frozen stars.”

At the event horizon, even spacetime itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside, both the camera and the space-time in which it moves rush towards the center of the black hole, a one-dimensional point called the singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them stop operating.

“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its spaghettification destruction is only 12.8 seconds away,” Schnittman said. From there, it is only 128,000 kilometers to the singularity. This last leg of the journey ends in the blink of an eye.

In the alternative scenario, the camera orbits near the event horizon but never crosses it and escapes to safety. If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this six-hour round trip while his colleagues on a mother ship stayed away from the black hole, he would return 36 minutes younger than his colleagues. This is because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving near the speed of light.

“This situation may be even more extreme,” Schnittman said. “If the black hole were spinning rapidly, like the one shown in the 2014 film ‘Interstellar,’ it would return many years younger than its mission companions.”