Supermassive black holes are capable of violently devouring entire stars and distorting the very structure of spacetime with their almost incomprehensible mass and gravitational influence. Their incredible power and mysterious nature have captured the imagination of generations of scientists and entertainers, from Albert Einstein to Christopher Noland, who sought to make the unknowable understandable through their works of audiovisual art and ground-breaking research.
Now, a new set of NASA supercomputer simulations is giving the public a chance to see the reality-altering impact of those cosmic leviathans up close, showing them what it would be like to travel through the event horizon of a supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 4.3 million Suns.
“People often ask about this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to real consequences in the real universe,” explained NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who worked on the visualizations. . “So I simulated two different scenarios, one where the camera – a stand-in for the daring astronaut – just misses the event horizon and is ejected from the slingshot, and one where it crosses the line, sealing its fate.”
Have you ever wondered what happens when you fall into a black hole?
Thanks to a new, impressive visualization produced on NASA’s supercomputer, here we go #Blackhole week with a virtual plunge into the event horizon—the black hole point of no return: https://t.co/aIk9MC1ayK pic.twitter.com/CoMsArORj4
— NASA (@NASA) May 6, 2024
The simulations were created by Schnittman and fellow NASA scientist Brian Powell using the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. According to the agency, a typical laptop would take about ten years to tackle the monumental task, but Discover’s 129,000 processors were able to compile the visualizations in just five days, using just 0.3 percent of its computing power.
The singularity at the heart of the simulations was created to have roughly the same mass as the monstrous supermassive black hole lurking at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). As Schnittman explained, the incredible size of a supermassive black hole could work to the astronauts’ advantage, helping them survive until the point where the brave explorer passes through the event horizon, at which point they would be torn apart by a process known as spaghettification.
“The risk of spaghettifaction is much higher for small black holes the size of our Sun,” Schnittman said in an email to IGN. “For them, the tidal forces would really tear apart any normal spacecraft long before it reaches the horizon. For supermassive black holes like Sgr A*, the horizon is so large that it looks and feels flat, just as a ship on the ocean runs no risk of ‘falling over the horizon,’ even though it could easily fall over a waterfall into a river.”
“To calculate the exact point of spaghetti, we used the strength of a typical human body, which probably wouldn’t survive more than 10g of acceleration, so that’s the point at which we declared the camera destroyed,” continued the NASA astrophysicist. “For Sgr A*, this corresponds to only 1% of the event horizon radius. In other words, the camera/astronaut crosses the horizon and then still survives 99% of the way to the singularity before being ripped apart. Or burned by intense radiation, but that’s a story for another day.”
What would an intrepid explorer actually see when he dives into one of the darkest pockets of the universe? Well, as its name would imply, the singularity at the center of any black hole is impossible to observe directly, thanks to the fact that its gravity prevents even light itself from escaping the event horizon after passing through it. However, astronomers are able to observe the glowing mass of superheated material surrounding the black hole, settling into a flat disk as it is dragged inexorably towards the event horizon.
NASA’s supercomputer visualizations reveal in magnificent detail how the mass of 4.3 million Suns could radically distort the light of a flat accretion disk. Each simulation begins with the viewer staring at the black hole from about 400 million miles away. The gravitational influence of the cosmic leviathan can already be seen from here, manipulating the disc’s light to frame the top and bottom of the event horizon, echoing the appearance of the ‘Gargantu’ black hole seen in Christopher Noland’s 2014 film Interstellar.
As the journey continues, the influence of the supermassive black hole intensifies and creates a kaleidoscope of changing photon lines, which become thinner as the astronaut approaches and passes through the event horizon.
NASA has uploaded multiple versions of the simulations to YouTube, including a 360-degree YouTube video that allows viewers to freely look around as they fall into the deepest pits of space or, alternatively, travel to escape the allure of the insatiable singularity. Some of the videos also show information about camera perspective and how relativistic effects such as time dilation – a phenomenon where time passes at different rates for different observers depending on where they are and how fast they are traveling – would affect a person as they approach the singularity.
Check out this IGN article for an explanation of what time dilation is and how it could prove to be a headache for future astronauts exploring distant stars. If you want more astronomy news, why not read about a once-in-a-lifetime stellar explosion that should be visible from Earth later this year, or learn about how millions of frontier players have been jointly credited as authors of a peer-reviewed scientific study .
Image credit: NASA
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video game news for IGN. He has over eight years of experience covering the latest developments in multiple scientific fields and has absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer