At the center of the Milky Way galaxy exists a supermassive black hole that’s more than four million times the mass of the sun.
A human traveling to the black hole’s surface, known as the event horizon and point of no return, wouldn’t have a happy ending. The gravity beneath the event horizon is so strong that nothing can escape it.
But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has created a safe way for people to experience the scientific phenomenon.
NASA, on Monday, released an immersive visualization that simulates what entering a black hole would be like. There’s a 360-degree video that allows viewers to look around during the simulated free-fall and an explainer video that provides context to the experience.
The simulation shows a camera heading toward a black hole — similar to the one at the center of our galaxy — that’s surrounded by a flat, swirling cloud of hot gas called an accretion disk. The black hole’s event horizon spans around 16 million miles or about 17% of the distance between Earth and the sun.
The camera is destroyed by “spaghettification,” which is when an object is squeezed horizontally and stretched vertically, roughly 13 seconds after crossing the event horizon, according to NASA.
“At the event horizon, even space-time itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit,” NASA explains. “Once inside it, both the camera and the space-time in which it’s moving rush toward the black hole’s center — a one-dimensional point called a singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.”
In a different scenario simulated by NASA, the camera travels around the black hole and approaches the event horizon before turning around to safety. As NASA explains: “If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this six-hour round trip while her colleagues on a mothership remained far from the black hole, she’d return 36 minutes younger than her colleagues. That’s because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational Source and when moving near the speed of light.”
NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman and Brian Powell created the simulations on a Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland. The project would have taken more than a decade to complete on a typical laptop, but NASA only needed around five days to finish it.
