NASA Goddard took to its YouTube channel to share an incredible visualization of what it would look like to fall into a supermassive black hole.
The space agency explains via the description of the video that a NASA supercomputer was used to create a scenario where a camera, or as NASA put it, “a stand-in for a daring astronaut,” was placed within the orbit of a supermassive black hole. The camera orbits the supermassive black hole, pulled in by its intense gravity, and then passes the black hole’s event horizon.
The space agency explained that the supermassive black hole within the visualization is approximately 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, and the entire video was created using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The event horizon is the boundary around a black hole that light can no longer escape due to the intense gravity of the astronomical object.
Orbiting the event horizon is the accretion disk, which is comprised of hot gas and, in this visualization, serves as a visual anchor for what happens to the camera as it passes deeper and deeper into the black hole.
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“The project generated about 10 terabytes of data – equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress – and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop,” writes NASA
