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Falling into a black hole may not be possible due to obvious space travel constraints posed. But hypothetically, if one falls into a black hole, what would be the consequences? Now an advanced visualisation by a NASA supercomputer can tell what happens when one gets inside a black hole to the point of no return.
"People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe," Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualisations said in a statement. "So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera—a stand-in for a daring astronaut—just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate."
What are the visualisations like?
The visualisations are in the form of explainer videos that act as sightseeing guides, illuminating the bizarre effects of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Versions such as 360-degree videos let viewers look all around during the trip, while others play as flat all-sky maps.
The simulated destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun.
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The simulated black hole's event horizon spans about 16 million miles (25 million kilometres), or about 17 per cent of the distance from Earth to the sun.
When one approaches the black hole in simulated form, speeds closer to that of light itself are reached. The light appears brighter and whiter when looking into the direction of travel.
"Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away," Schnittman said. From there, it's only 128,000 kilometres to the singularity, a voyage that gets over in the blink of an eye.
In the alternative scenario, the camera orbits close to the event horizon but it never crosses over and escapes to safety.
Now let's say an astronaut flew a spacecraft on this 6-hour round trip while her colleagues on a mothership remained far from the black hole, she would return 36 minutes younger than her colleagues. This is because time passes more slowly near a strong gravitational source and when moving near the speed of light.
"This situation can be even more extreme," Schnittman noted. "If the black hole were rapidly rotating, like the one shown in the 2014 movie 'Interstellar,' she would return many years younger than her shipmates."
