Daring to Enter the Depths of Space’s Most Fearsome Vortex: NASA’s Simulation of Falling into a Supermassive Black Hole

NASA’s new graphic depicts the terrifying experience of falling into a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way. Researchers used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Climate Simulation Center to create this simulation. The video shows what it would be like to observe from an accretion disk of glowing gas around a supermassive black hole, with vision changes as you descend towards it. As you pass through light particles swirling around the black hole, you reach the event horizon, where even light cannot escape.

Black holes are some of the densest objects in space, and scientists have a good understanding of their physics. Gravity around a black hole is so strong that it distorts space-time and causes objects to move close to the speed of light. Time also slows down near a black hole due to this phenomenon.

Stellar-mass black holes, which are much smaller than supermassive ones, cause intense tidal forces due to changes in gravity and can cause what is known as the spaghetti effect. This occurs when objects are torn apart before reaching their event horizon when approaching stellar-mass black holes.

In this new simulation, researchers studied what would happen if someone got too close to a supermassive black hole. These massive and relatively calm black holes still result in the spaghetti effect but with an added twist – you would first pass through the event horizon before being destroyed by gravity within seconds and compressed matter reaching almost instantly after crossing it.

The simulation is based on data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Event Horizon Telescope’s observation of the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This data was reported by Live Science on May 7th.