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Newly released NASA video takes you around a black hole - or into one
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# Newly released NASA video takes viewers around a black hole — or
into one
With a supercomputer and the better part of a week, a NASA scientist
delivered a journey into the unknown
Published May 08, 2024 • Last updated May 09, 2024 • 3 minute read
A frame from the new NASA video shows the viewer approaching a
supermassive black hole like the one at the centre of our galaxy.
Photo by NASA
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What would it be like to fall into a black hole, the densest object in
the universe? A NASA astrophysicist and his trusty supercomputer have
provided a stunning answer and even a way to experience it - minus the
crushing gravitational forces and certain death that would accompany
such a trip.
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The videos, which have been uploaded to YouTube in both a flat-screen
and 360-degree virtual reality versions, let viewers experience the
mind bending (and light bending) visions of either flying around a
black hole or, for the more adventurous, plunging directly into one.
It is, in a word, trippy.
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"People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-
imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to
actual consequences in the real universe," Jeremy Schnittman, a NASA
astrophysicist, said in a press release. "So I simulated two different
scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut —
just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where
it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate."
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In the first version, the camera approaches what looks to be a jet-
black orb, surrounded by a glowing orange ring. As it gets close, the
ring seems to stretch and then flip itself inside out, before looping
up like a fiery skipping rope suspended in space. In the second, the
rope gets thinner and stretches out until it disappears into utter
blackness.
In the NASA video, as the camera approaches a supermassive black hole,
the fiery ring seems to stretch and then flip itself inside out. Photo
by NASA
In both cases, the object is a supermassive black hole with 4.3
million times the mass of the sun. There's one just like it at the
centre of the Milky Way galaxy. It's called Sagittarius A* (pronounced
"A star") and is more than 25,000 light years away, or 235 quadrillion
kms. Far out.
"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black
hole," Schnittman said. (Though in real life, "neither" might be an
even better choice.) "Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to
about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and
stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before
they get to the horizon." This process, by which objects are stretched
out like a noodle, gets the scientific term "spaghettification."
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Although there are short versions of the video that let you just watch
the camera orbit or enter the black hole, slightly longer clips
include more information about exactly what is happening.
The thin inner circle of light is called the photon ring, they
explain, and is produced by light that has orbited the black hole
before escaping again. It's a region outside the so-called event
horizon, which is the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can
escape the black hole's massive gravity.
In the version in which the camera makes its plunge into the black
hole, the video helpfully points out that a real camera would in fact
be destroyed, a tiny fraction of a second before reaching the centre,
or singularity, of the black hole.
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To create the visualizations, Schnittman and fellow NASA scientist
Brian Powell used the Discover supercomputer at the agency's Center
for Climate Simulation. The 10 terabytes of data created would have
taken more than a decade to process using a standard laptop, but the
supercomputer was able to generate the video in just five days, using
only a fraction of its computing power.
The simulations also show off the time dilation effects of being near
a black hole, with Schnittman pointing out that, in the orbital
simulation, a six-hour trip around the black hole would end with the
astronaut returning having aged 36 minutes less than her less
adventurous colleagues.
"This situation can be even more extreme," he added. "If the black
hole were rapidly rotating, like the one shown in the 2014 movie
Interstellar, she would return many years younger than her shipmates."
Good to know that filmmaker Christopher Nolan got his science right on
that one.
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