What’s in a black hole? NASA video simulates diving into the heart of a mysterious celestial object

In the form of flat maps, 360-degree videos and even scientific guides, NASA offers a dive into the heart of a black hole. The American space agency published this Monday, May 6, various content about celestial objects, raising many questions among mere mortals.

To answer this question, astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman ran simulations of two scenarios. In the first, an expert working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland (USA) imagined a simple passage over a black hole. But the second simulation doesn’t just fly over the event, it presents the point of view of an astronaut inside.

“People often ask this question, and modeling these hard-to-understand processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to consequences in the real universe.”Jeremy Schnittman explains in a NASA press release.

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A simulation that would take ten years to run on an average computer.

To obtain his results, the astrophysicist used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Modeling Center. The experiment required five days of work to generate 10 terabytes of data (or approximately 1,250 GB). It must be said that he barely encroached on the computing power of Discover’s 129,000 processors, appropriating only 0.3% of its capacity. However, a normal laptop would take more than 10 years to do the same.

The most beautiful photographs taken by Thomas Pesquet from space

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The final rendering places the viewer in front of a supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times that of the Sun. This is equivalent to the real black hole located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. A suggested choice for an astrophysicist who wants to see more.

“If you have a choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole.”– he assures. “Stellar-mass black holes containing up to about 30 times the mass of the Sunhave much smaller horizon lines and greater torsional forces that can tear apart approaching objects before they reach the horizon line.”

A phenomenon that may seem surprising, but which can be explained by the gravitational attraction of black holes. Those who are small see that the gravity at one end of the black hole is much stronger than at the other end. Therefore, objects falling into it are stretched like noodles, hence the name of the phenomenon by scientists: spaghettification.

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Singularity, the center of a black hole, where physics stops applying

Here the imaginary black hole measures about 25 million kilometers. This prevents the experience from ending too quickly. So, in real time, it takes three hours for the camera to get to the event horizon. The time it takes to make two full revolutions of 30 minutes each.

During the fall, the cloud of hot gas surrounding the black hole serves as a visual reference. In addition to this accretion disk, photon rings, the hot structures formed closest to the black hole, also serve as a guide. The image is complemented by a background depicting the view of the starry sky from Earth.

The experiment allows us to observe the distortion of images due to the distortion of space-time. It’s even possible to reach the center of a black hole: “A one-dimensional point called singularity, where laws of physics as far as we know, they stop working”describes NASA.

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By accelerating as it falls into a black hole, the simulation aims to force the camera to reach the speed of light. Once it crosses the horizon of the simulated black hole, the incoming object takes only 12.8 seconds to disintegrate through spaghettification. From now on, you still have to travel 128,000 kilometers to reach the singularity. But at these speeds, all it takes is blinking.