NASA Simulation: Journey into a Black Hole Revealed

Jakarta –

There is a question that has haunted mankind since we first learned about it black hole more than a hundred years ago, what was it like to go out with no return?

We don’t have the answer yet, but a new supercomputer simulation created by NASA may be our best guess, based on current data.

Black holes can be images of unknown objects. Formed from the cores of dead massive stars that collapsed under their own gravity, they are so dense that their material is compressed into space that physics cannot currently explain.

Made by a supercomputer NASAthe simulation tracks a camera approaching, orbiting briefly, and then crossing the event horizon, instead of returning for a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of our galaxy.

“People often ask about this, and simulating this difficult and difficult to imagine process helps me connect the mathematics involved with real world outcomes,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astronaut at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who created the visualization, cited from the official NASA website.

“So I simulated two different situations, one where the camera instead of a brave astronaut misses the event horizon and shines back, and another where the camera crosses the line , determining his fate,” he continued.

The target is a supermassive black hole with a mass 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, the same as the monster at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

“If you had a choice, you would want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” explained Schnittman.

“Stellar-mass black holes, which have a mass of about 30 solar masses, have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can tear apart a nearby object before it reaches the horizon,” he continued.

This happens because the gravitational pull at the end of the object closer to the black hole is much stronger than at the other end. Falling objects stretch like noodles, a process astronomers call spaghettification.

The event horizon of a simulated black hole stretches about 25 million kilometers, or about 17% of the Earth-Sun distance.

A swirling, swirling cloud of hot gas called an accretion disk surrounds it and serves as a visual reference during the fall.

So make light structures called photon rings, which are closer to a black hole from light that is circulated one or more times. The background of the starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene.

As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching distances closer to the speed of light itself, the glow from the accretion disk and background stars gets brighter and brighter, like the sound of a racing car speeding up

Their light appeared brighter and brighter as they looked at the road. The video begins with the camera nearly 640 million kilometers away, with the black hole quickly filling the scene.

Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and night sky become increasingly distorted, and even create multiple images as their light travels through space-time. is becoming more and more warlike.

In real time, the camera took about 3 hours to reach the event horizon, making almost two full 30-minute orbits along the way. But, for anyone watching from afar, the camera would never get there.

As space-time becomes more distorted the closer it reaches the horizon, the camera image will slow and then appear to freeze. That’s why astronomers first called black holes “frozen stars.”

At the event horizon, even space-time itself flows in at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside, both the camera and spacetime travel through a rush towards the center of the black hole.

“As soon as the camera goes over the horizon, its destruction from spaghettification is only 12.8 seconds away,” Schnittman said.

From there, it is only 128 thousand kilometers to the singularity. The last part of this journey will be over in the blink of an eye.

In another instance, the camera pans close to the event horizon but never crosses over and escapes to safety.

If an astronaut flies a spacecraft on a 6-hour round trip while his colleagues on the mothership are still far away from the black hole, he will return 36 minutes younger than his colleagues.

This is because time moves more slowly near strong gravitational sources and when they move closer to the speed of light.

“This situation could be worse,” Schnittman said. “If a black hole rotates quickly, as seen in the 2014 movie ‘Interstellar’, it will return several years younger than its peers,” he said. .

Watch video”NASA creates a simulation of being thrust into a black hole“

(rns/rns)