Ever Wonder What It’s Like to Fall into a Black Hole?

Amaze Lab

Black holes are one of our universe’s greatest mysteries, with no one really understanding what happens once an object passes one of their event horizons. However, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has now built a supercomputer simulation revealing what it might theoretically be like to enter one of these cosmic vortices.

Transcript

00:00Black holes are one of our universe's greatest mysteries, with no one really understanding

00:08what happens once an object passes one of their event horizons.

00:12However, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has now built a supercomputer

00:17simulation, revealing what it might theoretically be like to enter one of these cosmic vortices.

00:23Astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman ran two simulations, the first of which shows what it would be like

00:27for an astronaut to graze an event horizon, but not pass through it.

00:30An event horizon is essentially the point of no return with regards to black holes, as

00:35anything which passes over one, even light, can never escape again.

00:38And that's one reason why black holes are so mysterious.

00:41We don't really know what happens on the other side.

00:43Even physics enters the territory of paradox when attempting to define the inner workings

00:47of black holes.

00:48Still, a second computer simulation attempts to show, as best we can guess, what plunging

00:52into a black hole might be like.

00:54The simulation begins relatively similarly to the first, until it ends in utter blackness.

00:59No doubt a byproduct of physics breaking down around you.

01:02Schnittman says that on a consumer-grade computer, the calculations used to produce these visualizations

01:07would have taken some 10 years to complete.

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