A NASA (United States Space Agency) released videos of a simulation of the entry into a black hole. Two productions were released: one that explains the physics involved in each part of the trip and another that allows 360º movement of the camera in the region.
To produce the images, NASA’s Discover supercomputer needed five days and 10 terabytes of data were generated, equivalent to about half the text content of the United States Library of Congress. On a regular computer, the same processing would take more than a decade.
The simulated trip is to a black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to “Sagittarius A*”, located in the center of the Milky Way.
Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who created the visualizations, explains that: “The event horizon [fronteira em que a força da gravidade é tão forte que nada escapa] of the simulated black hole extends about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), or approximately 17% of the distance from Earth to the Sun.”
And he adds: “A flat, rotating cloud of hot, glowing gas, called an accretion disk, surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during the fall. Also visible are bright structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky, as seen from Earth, completes the scene.”
When the event horizon passes, everything moves towards the center of the black hole, a point called singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them no longer operate. If it actually went in, the camera would be destroyed in 12.8 seconds due to the strong gravitational field.
For those who observe from afar, the event horizon (the limit beyond which not even light can escape the gravitational force of the black hole) may never seem to arrive. This is because the fabric of space-time becomes increasingly distorted near this limit, to the point where the camera slows down so that it appears that it is frozen.
“If an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this six-hour round trip while her colleagues on a mothership remained away from the black hole, she would return 36 minutes younger than her colleagues. This occurs because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving close to the speed of light,” the Space Agency reported in a statement.
You can see more angles of the simulation in the NASA website.
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