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If you’ve seen Matthew McConaughey navigate into a supermassive black hole in “Interstellar”, you may have some idea of what encountering one of these frightening cosmic entities could be like.
However, a Hollywood movie set in the distant future cannot compare to the actual experience – even if it was directed by Christopher Nolan. Now, a decade after “Interstellar” graced the big screen, NASA is offering a glimpse into what it would be like to fall into a black hole.
Even the bravest space explorers are nowhere near these massive cosmic giants, where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape.
For now, the simulations released by NASA on Monday offer a glimpse of what one might witness while hurtling towards the event horizon of a black hole, leading to an inevitable end. Another simulation by NASA shows the perspective of an astronaut flying past a black hole, where space seems to warp and transform.
Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created these visualizations, explained, “I simulated two scenarios – one where a camera, representing a daring astronaut, narrowly misses the event horizon and gets flung back, and another where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”
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NASA simulations show descent into black hole
While our knowledge of black holes has grown significantly in recent years since the first one was discovered in 1964, these objects still hold many mysteries.
The new visualizations from NASA, available on Goddard’s YouTube channel, shed light on some of these mysteries. The visualizations consist of one-minute journeys presented as 360-degree videos that allow viewers to explore their surroundings, along with more detailed versions providing explanations of the observed phenomena.
The endpoint of the simulation is a virtual supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times that of the Sun, equivalent in size to the enormous Sagittarius A* at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.
The initial simulation depicts the viewer approaching the black hole from a distance of around 400 million miles and rapidly descending towards the event horizon – a theoretical boundary known as the “point of no return” where light and other radiation cannot escape. Similar to Sagittarius A*, the event horizon in the simulation extends about 16 million miles.
Cloud formations like photon rings and a flat, swirling disk of hot, luminous gas referred to as an accretion disk encircling the black hole provide visual markers along the journey. As the camera nears the speed of light, the accretion disk distorts further as space-time bends.
Once inside the black hole, the viewer hurtles towards the singularity at the center – a one-dimensional point where conventional physics no longer applies.
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div class=”gnt_em_cp_cw”>The simulation utilized the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and produced approximately 10 terabytes of data, equating to about half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress.
A second simulation illustrates a scenario where a viewer narrowly avoids falling into a black hole, highlighting three general categories of black holes based on mass: stellar-mass, supermassive, and intermediate-mass.
Stellar-mass black holes, formed when a star with over eight solar masses exhausts its fuel and explodes as a supernova, are less favorable to fall into compared to supermassive black holes due to their smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces. The gravitational pull near a black hole can lead to spaghettification, a process where falling objects stretch out like noodles, potentially tearing them apart.
In the simulated black hole scenario presented, it would take only around 12.8 seconds for the viewer to succumb to spaghettification. However, an alternate simulation features a viewer orbiting near the event horizon but manages to escape safely without crossing it.
Additionally, if an astronaut were to travel on a spacecraft for a 6-hour round trip near a strong gravitational source, they would return 36 minutes younger than those who remained farther away, as explained by NASA. This time dilation effect is a concept familiar to fans of “Interstellar” and can be even more pronounced with a rapidly rotating black hole.
The article mentions Eric Lagatta as the reporter covering breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. For further information, you can reach him at elagatta@gannett.com.
