NASA’s 360° immersive experience around a supermassive black hole, showing extraordinary gravitational and temporal effects.
If you’ve ever dreamed of flying into a black hole, but the idea of being turned into spaghetti into plasma doesn’t appeal to you, NASA has the perfect solution for you. Imagine immersing yourself in a stunning 360° visualization that shows you what it would be like to travel around a black hole before plunging into the event horizon.
The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return, the threshold that separates the black hole from the rest of the universe. Once this line is crossed, nothing, not even light, can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull.
Using a NASA supercomputer, it was possible to create an amazing simulation showing what would happen if you approached or even fell into a black hole. This project was created by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
In the visualization, two different scenarios are simulated: one in which a camera, acting as a stand-in for an astronaut, just grazes the event horizon and bounces back, and one in which it crosses the border, sealing its fate.
The black hole in question is similar to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, with a mass 4.3 million times that of our Sun and an event horizon 25 million kilometers in diameter.
In the simulation, you move at speeds faster than the speed of light, starting 640 million kilometers before approaching the black hole. Schnittman explains that falling into a supermassive black hole is preferable, as smaller stellar black holes can tear apart approaching objects due to stronger tidal forces.
In the second simulation, the camera approaches and falls towards the supermassive black hole before managing to escape. If you were to actually travel around the black hole, your perception of time would undergo a significant change.
A trip to orbit a black hole would make you look younger, as time would slow down due to speed and gravity. In this visualization, you would be 36 minutes younger than someone who remained in your starting position.
The peculiarities of black holes are fascinating and complex, and visualizations like these help make some of the most extraordinary aspects of these enigmatic cosmic objects more tangible.
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