NASA’s new graphic depicts what would happen if you fell into a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way.
Researchers created the simulation using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Climate Simulation Center. The video records the observation angle when falling straight through an accretion disk consisting of glowing gas around a supermassive black hole like the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The vision changes with the fall, passing through light particles flying quickly around the black hole, finally reaching the point of no return, the event horizon, where even light cannot escape. Live Science reported on May 7.
Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. No one knows exactly what matter looks like beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but researchers know a lot about the physics surrounding these super-dense spots in space. Around the black hole, gravity is so strong that the space-time field is distorted. The object is close to the speed of light. At that speed, time appears to slow down, as if a person orbiting a black hole in a spaceship for six hours would age 36 minutes slower than their colleague on the mothership, according to NASA.
The most common black holes in the universe are stellar-mass black holes. They have small event horizons and changes in gravity over small distances create intense tidal forces around them. Objects approaching stellar-mass black holes are often torn apart before reaching the event horizon in a process called the spaghetti effect. It can be imagined that if you fall straight down, the force of gravity on your feet will be stronger than on your head, causing your body to stretch like a noodle.
In the new simulation, astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center chose to simulate what would happen if someone got too close to the supermassive black hole. Due to their enormous size, supermassive black holes are like vast calm seas compared to stellar-mass black holes. You’ll still experience the spaghetti effect if you fall into it, but you’ll first fall through the event horizon.
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way was photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope. In photos, it looks like a doughnut made of incandescent gas, called an accretion disk, spinning around dark space. In the new simulation, the observer falls through this accretion disk. When reaching the event horizon, the sky narrows and the blackness begins to get closer.
The peak gravitational force destroyed the observer just 12.8 seconds after falling through the event horizon. A few microseconds later, the extremely compressed matter will reach the singularity, the center of the black hole. It’s a 128,000 km journey from the event horizon to the singularity, but it happens in the blink of an eye.