A new immersive visualization made by a NASA supercomputer shows what it would look like to fall into a black hole in 360 degrees.
NASA explains what it would look like to fall into a black hole
The reference point is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun and is the equivalent of the one that exists at the center of the Milky Way.
To create this simulation, Jeremy Schnittman, along with Goddard scientist Brian Powell, used the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Climate Simulation Center.
This project ended up with 10 terabytes of data and took approximately five days to run on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. Doing the same on a common computer would take more than ten years to achieve.
“If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole,” Schnittman explained. “Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.”
