Ever wondered what it would be like to fall into a black hole? A new NASA simulation has the answer — including the inevitable, crushing end.
Researchers created the new simulation using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. It shows a viewer plunging through the accretion disk of glowing gas around a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way. The viewer cartwheels through the plunge, passing ghostly racetracks of light particles that have orbited the black hole multiple times, finally hitting the point of no return: the event horizon, where nothing, not even light, can escape.
Black holes are the densest objects in the universe. No one knows exactly what matter looks like beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but researchers do know a lot about the physics surrounding these ultra-dense points in space. Around a black hole, gravitational forces are so strong that space-time itself warps. Objects (and space-time itself) approach the speed of light; at these speeds, time seems to slow, such that a person orbiting a black hole for six hours in a spacecraft would age 36 minutes slower than her crewmates on the mothership, according to a NASA statement.
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