Have you ever wondered what it would be like to fall in… Black hole? A new NASA simulation has the answer, including the inevitable, crushing ending.
The researchers created the new simulation using the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. It shows a viewer being immersed in an accretion disk of glowing gas around a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of a galaxy. milky way. The viewer wanders through the plunge, passing ghostly racing tracks of light particles that have orbited the black hole several times, finally arriving at the point of no return: the event horizon, where nothing, not even light, can escape.
Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. no one knows Exactly what it sounds like beyond the black hole’s event horizon, but researchers know a lot about the physics surrounding these superdense points in space. Around a black hole, gravitational forces are very strong Free time Itself is crooked. Objects (and spacetime itself) are getting closer The speed of light; At these speeds, time appears to slow down, so that a person orbiting a black hole for six hours in a spacecraft would be 36 minutes slower than his or her crewmates on the mothership. According to a NASA statement.
The most common black holes in the universe are the size of stars. these Stellar mass black holes They have small event horizons, and extreme gravitational changes at small distances produce violent tidal forces around them. Objects approaching stellar-mass black holes are often torn apart before they reach the event horizon in a process called macaroni. Imagine falling feet-first into a black hole: the gravity acting on your feet would be stronger than that acting on your head, causing your body to stretch like spaghetti.
Related: A new ‘twisted’ gravity theory says information can escape black holes after all
In the new simulation, the world of astrophysicists Jeremy Schnittman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, chose instead to replicate what would happen if someone approached a supermassive black hole, like the one at the center of the Milky Way. Thanks to their size, these supermassive black holes resemble vast, calm seas compared to stellar-mass black holes. You’ll still be disappointed if you fall into one, but you may be able to get past the event horizon first.
It was the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. In images, it looks like a cake of glowing gas — known as an accretion disk — orbiting a patch of endless darkness. Through this accumulation disk the viewer falls into the new simulation. When they reach the event horizon, the sky narrows and darkness begins to approach; Here, the light shines, but it can never leave.
The observer is destroyed by overwhelming gravitational forces just 12.8 seconds after it passes the event horizon. A microsecond later, all the rest of its highly compressed matter hits the singularity, the center of the black hole. It’s a 79,500-mile (128,000 km) journey from the event horizon to the singularity, but it happens in the blink of an eye.
Sheitman also simulated a non-fatal scenario, in which an astronaut orbits a black hole several times and then escapes back into space.
“[S]Simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me relate mathematics Relativity “To actual consequences in the real universe,” he said in the statement.
“Beer fan. Travel specialist. Amateur alcohol scholar. Bacon trailblazer. Music fanatic.”