New NASA supercomputer simulations reveal what it would be like to fall into a supermassive black hole

May 9, 2024 Vaseline stjohnson 0

Supermassive black holes are capable of violently devouring entire stars and warping the very fabric of space-time with their almost incomprehensible mass and gravitational influence. Its astonishing power and mysterious nature have captured the imagination of generations of scientists and artists, from Albert Einstein to Christopher Noland, who have sought to make the unknowable understandable through their works of audiovisual art and groundbreaking research.

Now, a new set of NASA supercomputer simulations is giving the public a chance to see the reality-bending influence of these 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 the equivalent of 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-world consequences in the real universe,” explained NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who worked to create the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera (a stand-in for a daring astronaut) simply misses the event horizon and ejects, and another in which it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.”

The simulations were produced by Schnittman and fellow NASA scientist Brian Powell using the Discover supercomputer located at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center. According to the agency, it would have taken a typical laptop about a decade to accomplish this 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 center of the simulations was created to have about 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 explains, the incredible size of the supermassive black hole could benefit astronauts, 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 spaghettification is much greater for small black holes on the order of the mass of our sun,” Schnittman said in an email to IGN. “For them, tidal forces would destroy 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 in the ocean is not at risk of “falling over the horizon,” although it could easily fall over a waterfall. in a small river.”

“To calculate the exact point of spaghettification, we used the force of a typical human body, which probably would not survive more than 10 g of acceleration, so that is the point at which we declared that the chamber was destroyed,” continued the NASA astrophysicist. . “For Sgr A*, that corresponds to only 1% of the radius of the event horizon. In other words, the camera/astronaut crosses the horizon and then survives 99% of the way to the singularity before being torn apart. Or burned by the intense radiation, but that’s a story for another day.”

As for what an intrepid explorer would actually see when diving into one of the darkest areas of the universe? Well, as its name implies, the singularity at the center of any black hole is impossible to observe directly, due to the fact that its gravity prevents even light itself from escaping the event horizon once it has passed through it. However, astronomers are capable of observing the bright mass of superheated material surrounding a black hole, which settles into a flat disk as it is pulled inexorably toward the event horizon.

NASA supercomputer visualizations reveal in magnificent detail how the mass of 4.3 million suns could work to radically warp light from the flat accretion disk. Each simulation begins with the viewer looking at the black hole from a distance of around 400 million miles. From here, the gravitational influence of the cosmic leviathan can already be observed, as it manipulates the light from the disk to frame the top and bottom of the event horizon, echoing the appearance of the ‘Gargantua’ black hole seen in Christopher’s film Interstellar Noland 2014.

As the journey continues, the influence of the supermassive black hole intensifies to create a kaleidoscope of shifting photon lines, which become increasingly thinner as the future 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 cosmic pits or, alternatively, travel to escape the attraction. of insatiable singularity. Some of the videos also show information about camera perspective and how relativistic effects such as time dilation – a phenomenon in which time passes at different speeds for different observers depending on where they are and the speed at which they travel- would affect a person as they approached 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. For more astronomy news, why not read about a once-in-a-lifetime stellar explosion that should be visible from Earth later this year, or find out how millions of Borderlands players were collectively included as authors of a scientific study peer reviewed?

Image credit: NASA

Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years of experience covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and has absolutely no time for mischief. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer