For the first time, a NASA video simulation has shown what it’s like to enter a black hole

Since its discovery, scientists, astrophysicists and even space enthusiasts have asked themselves: What’s inside a Black hole? How do you cross your event horizon? What happens to light when we are massive in that deep black hole?

Because it’s impossible to know, since then These objects in the universe are very far from Earth It is enough to visit them, and even if the opportunity existed, there would be no way to get out of there alive, say experts from a pot I found some of these answers.

that it New simulation developed by supercomputer Which came up with our best guess about what it would be like to enter a black hole, based on current data.

“People often ask about… What is a black hole and how do you get into it? “Simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect relativistic mathematics to real consequences in the real universe,” the astrophysicist said. Jeremy Schnittman From NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, responsible for this new simulation

He added: “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which the camera fails, as if it were a substitute for a daring astronaut, at the event horizon and is taken out, and the other in which it crosses the border and determines its fate.” The expert.

What are black holes?

Black holes are the densest objects in the universe that we know of. It is so compact that we can only describe it mathematically as a singularity: a one-dimensional point of infinite density.

Its density is so intense that… Space-time is gravitationally distorted In what is actually a closed field around him. Within this field, even light does not have enough speed to escape.

As for the dimensions it can reach, its known limit is the event horizon. In general relativity, an event horizon – or event horizon – refers to a hyperparametric surface of space-time, such that events occurring on one side of it cannot affect an observer on the other side.

The more massive the black hole, the larger the radius of the sphere defined by the event horizon, known as the Schwarzschild radius. If the sun were a black hole, for example, it would It will be the Schwarzschild radius Only 2.95 kilometers.

The simulation conducted by NASA experts was a unique development. On a typical laptop, this simulation would take more than a decade to compute. The Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center It accomplished this feat in 5 days using only 0.3 percent of its processing power.

At the beginning of the video, a thin inner circle called a photon ring is shown. It is the image it produces Light that orbits the black hole one or more times before escaping. This oval, centered in the direction of the camera’s movement, shows the entire simulated sky.

In the simulation, experts placed a camera instead of a person, to imagine what entering the black hole would look like. Camera speed makes Light sources directly in front of you shine brightly as they descend 10 minutes toward the event horizon. There, the light of the outer universe still shines, but it can never leave. After a microsecond the chamber is destroyed and the singularity is reached.

In 2019 and 2022, a planetary network of radio observatories called the Event Horizon Telescope was established. They produced, respectively, the first images of giant black holes at the centers of M87 and the Milky Way, revealing a bright ring of hot gas in orbit surrounding a circular region of darkness.

Any light that crosses the event horizon, the black hole’s point of no return, is trapped forever, and any light that passes near it is redirected by the black hole’s intense gravity. Together, these effects produce a “shadow” that is twice the size of the black hole’s actual event horizon.

As far as we know, The smallest black holes start with just a few Five times the mass of the sunThey are objects formed from the collapsed core of a massive star at the end of its life. These are black holes with stellar mass.

Stellar-mass black holes have an upper limit of about 65 times the mass of the sun, Because the extremely powerful progenitor stars that would produce these larger objects end their lives in a pair of unstable supernovae that completely destroy the core, leaving nothing behind to collapse into the black hole.

However, we have seen stellar mass black holes with masses exceeding 65 solar masses. It can be formed when Black holes collide and merge, Resulting in an object with combined mass. But how do we get from these to… Massive and supermassive black holes It’s a big empty space. Quite literally.

There is a strange paucity of detected black holes in the mass range between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes. But there is also a wide range of supermassive black holes.

The black hole at the heart of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced ay-star), has the mass of 4.3 million suns based on long-term tracking of stars orbiting it. The diameter of its shadow extends over about half the orbit of Mercury in our solar system.

“Since 2015, gravitational wave observatories on Earth have detected black hole mergers with masses of a few tens of solar masses, thanks to small ripples in spacetime produced by these events,” said Ira Thorpe, an astrophysicist at Goddard.

He concluded that “mergers of supermassive black holes will produce waves with much lower frequencies that can be detected using a space observatory millions of times larger than their terrestrial counterparts.”