We have all thought about it. No one has done it, but now, thanks to HPC, we see what it looks like. Hold on to your feet because NASA has released videos of what it is like to orbit and enter a black hole. And yes, it crosses the event horizon (don’t worry, nothing to see there) and is eventually destroyed in the singularity.
Higher-resolution videos can be found on the NASA Goddard Site. There are two tracks in the videos. The first is the “plunge” into the black hole, and the second is an orbit around the black hole (and then escaping). Each video has an entire run (complete with cool black hole space music) of the video followed by a second run with explanations. As part of the explanation, the camera track is shown in the lower right corner, and the time dilation between local time and camera time is presented in the lower left corner.
The visualizations are available in multiple formats, including 360-degree videos that let viewers look around during the trip. To create the visualizations, Goddard scientists used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. Discover has 129,000 cores spanning several generations of Intel CPUs and is composed of multiple commodity Linux scalable units. Performance is benchmarked at nearly 8.1 petaflops.
The project generated about ten terabytes of data and took about five days to run on just 0.3% of Discover’s processors. To provide some perspective, using a typical laptop, the simulations would take more than a decade.
The simulated 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. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole simulation was configured to be non-rotating. Similar to the scientifically accurate images created for the movie Interstellar, a flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference. A backdrop of the starry sky from Earth completes the scene.
In case you are wondering, there is no conjecture about the inside of the black hole. The fate of the camera is typical for most black hole plunges.
“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away,” reports Jeremy Schnittman, Visualizer project. “From there, it’s only 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to the singularity. This final leg of the voyage is over in the blink of an eye.”
HPC provides the remarkable capability of creating physically impossible scientific voyages. These videos represent hard work, CPU cycles, and a desire to visualize one of the most extraordinary objects in the universe; enjoy your plunge.
Production Credits
Producer: Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Science Writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Visualizer: Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)
Support: Brian Powell (NASA/GSFC) Ernie Wright (USRA)
