What would we see if we had the chance to travel inside a black hole? A question covered in major Hollywood films (one above all Interstellar) and which has always fueled the debate among scientists. NASA, the United States aerospace agency, has created a video simulation using a supercomputer that tries to answer this question. Psychedelic and unique, 360-degree immersive images, which allow you to dive towards the event horizon of a black hole with a mass 4.3 million times that of our Sun.
Journey into a black hole: the NASA video
The video is very reminiscent of what was seen in Christopher Nolan's film, but the simulation is even more accurate: by exploiting the capabilities of the 129 thousand processors of NASA's Discover supercomputer it was possible to recreate an extremely realistic scenario: “We often ask ourselves this and simulate these difficult processes to imagine helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to the actual consequences in the real universe – explained the authors of the film, Jeremy Schnittman and the astrophysicist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center – I simulated two different scenarios: one in which a camera, like the stand-in for a daring astronaut, just grazes the event horizon and bounces off it, and one in which it crosses the border, sealing its fate”.
The result is nothing short of exceptional and hypnotic, and allows for total immersion in one of the most mysterious and fascinating objects in the universe, a supermassive black hole whose size resembles the one found at the center of the Milky Way. The footage created by NASA begins 640 million kilometers away from the black hole and begins a rapid approach. Within moments the gases surrounding it become more and more evident, before the sky becomes increasingly distorted, with multiple, irregular shapes. As the distance to the black hole decreases the disk's glow becomes stronger and stronger, a gradual increase, ending upon entry into the singularity. From that moment, we find ourselves immersed in the void, in a dark limbo, where not even light can penetrate and where the laws of physics known to us cease to be valid.