Ready to plunge into a black hole?
NASA supercomputers produced this immersive visualization that allows you to dive in without it becoming a one-way trip. The destination: a black hole, similar in size to the one at the heart of the Milky Way.
As you get closer to the black hole, your speed climbs until it approaches the speed of light — the cosmic speed limit! The glow from the stars in the background and from the disk of hot material surrounding the black hole becomes amplified, growing brighter and whiter. The effect is similar to how the sound of an oncoming racecar rises in pitch.
Along the way, the black hole’s disk and the night sky become increasingly distorted and even form multiple images as their light crosses the increasingly-warped space-time.
This 400-million-mile (640-million-km) trip would take you about 3 hours. It’s quite a ride — and you’d only get to do it once if this wasn’t a simulation!
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Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell
Music: “Tidal Force,” Thomas Daniel Bellingham [PRS], Universal Production Music
Video description:
A black hole with a glowing orange disk of material sits near the center of a starry background. Light from the disk is distorted by the black hole’s strong gravity, with the far side of the disk visible above and below it. The camera approaches the black hole, making almost two trips around before crossing the event horizon. As the camera loops around, the screen is black toward the black hole’s location at the bottom. The orange disk appears to stretch and arc into a thin line that breaks off into a loop that passes overhead several times. Once inside the event horizon, the screen becomes increasingly black. The orange disk makes one more loop before becoming a thin ribbon across the top. The starry sky crams together just above the ribbon. Finally, the camera shakes, indicating its destruction.
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