What would happen and what would we see when traveling inside a black hole? The answer is provided by the new 360-degree immersive video simulations produced thanks to a NASA supercomputer that allow us to dive beyond the event horizon of a black hole with a mass 4.3 million times that of our Sun.
“We often ask this, and simulating these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,” said Jeremy Schnittman, the astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who created the visualizations. “So I simulated two different scenarios, one in which a camera—a stand-in for a daring astronaut—just grazes the event horizon and bounces off it, and one in which it crosses the border, sealing his fate.” A journey imagined in the film Interstellar and now simulated even more accurately by exploiting the capabilities of the 129 thousand processors of NASA’s Discover supercomputer. The end result is 360-degree videos in which you can look around as you get closer and closer to one of the most mysterious and fascinating objects in the universe, a supermassive black hole surrounded by a large ring of gas that rotates around it
NASA, traveling towards a black hole: the 360 degree simulation
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