Anyone who has attended an informative talk on astronomy has heard someone during question time who wants to know what would happen if we got into inside a black hole. This must be one of the questions astronomers hear most often. Therefore, a NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schmitman wanted to give the answer once and for all thanks to one of NASA’s most powerful supercomputers.
In his modeling, which can be seen on the space agency’s YouTube channel, depicts what would happen if a camera flew toward a black hole and fell inward. It’s important to remember that if you’ve dedicated yourself to simulating this, it’s because it can’t be done in real life. Nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light. That’s why they are called black. It is logical that neither the best spacecraft nor the most stable camera could avoid this fate.
In fact, it is difficult to see even in simulation. Using a conventional computer, it would take more than ten years to process all the necessary information. However, thanks Discover the supercomputer at NASA Goddard Center, it was done in 5 days. And it uses only 0.3% of its power.
Looking for the best candidate
No one can travel inside a black hole, no matter its size. gravitational attraction its effect is so great that once a certain distance, known as the event horizon, is crossed, everything falls inward, destroying itself along the way.
However, if we had to choose, it would be better huge black hole. The smallest, with a mass equivalent to a maximum of 30 suns, They have a shorter event horizon.
When a body approaches a black hole, its nearest end experiences a much greater gravitational pull than the other end. Usually this is enough to overcome the adhesive forces of the particles of the object in such a way that it stretches, acquiring very elongated shape. This phenomenon is known as spaghettification, and it happens much faster with black holes that have a small event horizon.
So while we couldn’t escape any of them, a supermassive black hole would at least give us a little more room to move around. The one chosen for NASA’s simulation is very similar to the one found in center of the Milky Way. It has mass 4.3 million times larger than the Sun and event horizon 25 million kilometers. Consequently, spaghettification would have occurred, but somewhat later, already during the jump into the black hole.
Travel inside a black hole
In this NASA simulation we see the journey that the camera travels into the interior of a black hole. At first, a black hole is visible, which gradually approaches the focus. A disk of radiation and matter spins around it before falling inward. This is known as an accretion disk and reaches the event horizon. But also in the central part we see a thin circle, known as a photon ring, made of light rotating around it.
What happens step by step can be seen in the video itself, as well as in the NASA statement. Roughly speaking, as the camera approaches the black hole and reaches speeds closer and closer to the speed of light, the brightness of the accretion disk and stars in the background “intensifies in the same way that the pitch of an approaching race car increases in pitch. »
“Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and night sky become increasingly distorted, even forming multiple images as its light passes through increasingly distorted spacetime.”
Jeremy Schnittman, NASA astrophysicist
On the other hand, on the event horizon even spacetime It flows in at the speed of light. When this happens, “both the camera and the space-time in which it is moving rush towards the center of the black hole.” Once there, the laws of physics as we know them cease to apply.
But everything is already lost. Once the camera crosses the event horizon, it takes only 12.8 seconds. After this comes nothingness.
Therefore, what can be seen in this simulation is the path inside the black hole. There will be nothing left to show there, because not a single instrument can survive. Regardless, this video is the closest we’ll ever get to this mysterious journey. Worth a look.
Source: Hiper Textual
