The journey to the center of a black hole remains one of the great mysteries of physics. Once inside, both the camera and spacetime would plummet towards the singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them stop working.
That dive Matt McConaughey in the black hole he didn’t go that far from reality (after all, he chose Christopher Nolan as scientific consultant for Interstellar Kip Thorne, Nobel Prize for Physics 2017). Now NASA has published a simulation showing what would happen if we actually entered a black hole, a celestial body whose mass is compressed to such an extent that it generates a gravitational field so intense that it bend spacetime.
The film follows the journey inside the Interstelalr warmhole. It starts with the camera positioned nearly 640 million kilometers away, and then along the way, the black hole disk, photon rings and sky become increasingly distorted generating multiple images as their light passes through the warped space-time.
At the moment it is actually impossible to know for sure what happens inside a black hole, it is a journey of no return and once inside it is impossible to communicate with the outside. Yet the laws of physics allow us to imagine what could happen to a body that approaches the singularity.
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“People often ask what happens in a black hole, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe“, has explained Jeremy Schnittmanan astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualizations.
“So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera – a stand-in for a daring astronaut – just misses the event horizon and hurtles back, and one in which it crosses the border, sealing his fate.”
How the video was made
Rendered versions allow viewers to look around during the journey. To create the video Schnittman collaborated with his colleague Goddard Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. “The project generated approx 10 terabytes of dataequivalent to about half of the estimated textual content in the Library of Congress, and took about 5 days to run on just the 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop,” NASA explained.
The protagonist of the video is a supermassive black hole, its mass is 4.3 million times greater than our Sun, and it is located at the center of the Milky Way. “If I had to choose, I would want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to approx 30 solar massespossess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon.”
The journey inside the black hole
The simulated event horizon of the black hole extends for approx 25 million kilometersor about 17% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Around the black hole you can see a flat cloud composed of hot and luminous gas, it is the accretion disk which becomes a point of reference during the fall. As you get closer to the black hole, others appear luminous structurescalls photonic rings.
“As the camera gets closer to the black hole, reaching speeds closer and closer to that of light itself, the glow from the accretion disk and background stars is amplified in much the same way as the sound of a car oncoming traffic increases in tone. Their light appears brighter and whiter when looking in the direction of travel”, explains NASA.
What would happen if we entered a black hole
The one inside a black hole is a journey without return. Once the event horizon is exceeded, the mathematical limit indicating the distance beyond which not even light can escape the gravitational trap, it is not possible to exit. You could sooner, if you don’t cross the threshold, and if you have enough energy to “go back”. Not only that, once the event horizon is exceeded it is not possible to communicate with the outside.
The gravitational force of the black hole increases as it approaches the central singularity (a point at which the curvature of spacetime tends to an infinite value), the part of the object inside the black hole closest to the center is attracted more than the part further away , consequentially the body begins to lengthenis stretched into a long, thin strip, this process is called spaghettization.
The journey, once beyond the event horizon, towards the center of a black hole however, it remains one of the great mysteries of physics. Once inside, both the camera and space-time would plummet towards the singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them stop working.
