Dive over a black hole’s event horizon courtesy of new NASA video

Black holes, those mysterious places in space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, make for great plot twists in movies. But Hollywood aside, there are many things people don’t understand about a black hole. A new video from NASA attempts to show what it looks like when an object crosses the event horizon, or boundary, of a black hole. Since no technology can survive this experience, this could be as close as we’ll ever get.

The video, shot by NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman and Brian Powell, begins with a camera view floating toward a black hole. As the camera approaches, it rotates around the black hole before flying into the burning gas that surrounds it. It provides a beautiful image of some photon rings before they enter the event horizon. From there, the camera experiences the stretching and distortion colorfully known as spaghettification as it is pulled into the black hole. As the camera is sucked in, the simulated air shrinks. Moments later, the camera goes dark as it hits the singularity, the one-dimensional center of a black hole, where the laws of physics cease to exist.

The simulation is then played again, but with an explanation of each step of the process. The video is then played a third time, now in slow motion, and zoomed in to show the complexity of the photon ring layers. It ends with a final replay of the entire simulation, but this time with more technical details about how it was created. In total, the simulation is much more detailed than the images we have of the black hole in the Milky Way.

It’s quite a journey and it produces some truly striking images, especially those of the photon ring layers and the air shrinking rapidly as the camera is pulled in.

Schnittman also made a second video simulating the camera making a few orbits around the black hole before escaping safely. That’s a 360-degree YouTube video, allowing viewers to look around and see the entire journey from multiple angles.

The simulated black hole is huge

The black hole in the simulation has a diameter of about 25 million kilometers. That is much larger than Earth, and comparable to some black holes in our own cosmic backyard.

If you too want to fly into a black hole, Schnittman has some advice.

“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” he said. “Huge-mass black holes, containing up to about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear approaching objects apart before they reach the horizon.”

Basically, if you were to choose a small black hole in this hypothetical situation, you could be torn to pieces before you get to the good stuff. Supermassive black holes seem to be the best choice.

Thank you, NASA’s Discover supercomputer

The simulation was created using NASA’s Discover supercomputer, located at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data, which NASA estimates is equivalent to about half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress.

It took about five days to complete and used only 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. NASA says the same work on a regular laptop would have taken about ten years.

Why work on such a huge and comprehensive black hole simulation? Schnittman says it’s mainly for research.

“People ask about this often, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” Schnittman said in a post on the NASA site. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera – a stand-in for a daring astronaut – narrowly misses the event horizon and shoots back out, and one in which it crosses the line and seals its fate.”