2024-05-11 08:33:44
Black holes are fascinating and puzzling objects. As part of the fifth black hole week – Black Hole Week 2024 – NASA engineers invite us to dive into the heart of such a hole. A supermassive black hole like the one hidden in the center of our Milky Way. An experience that cannot be compared to anything else.
What would happen if you were in one black hole would fall? You’ve probably asked yourself this question before. And NASA has decided to give you an answer to that. A challenge even for astrophysicists. But one way for them is to practice the work of connecting the complex mathematics of relativity to its real-world consequences by simulating processes that are difficult to imagine.
NCCS or NASA Center for Climate Simulation is a science supercomputing center where they use the Discover supercomputer to perform various works and experiments. Internally, 127,232 cores allow it to reach 8.1 petaflops of computing power. pic.twitter.com/3z1WL1dsbx
— Adrian ⚡ (@Adrian_SMO_2000) 25 May 2023
A supercomputer to simulate a supermassive black hole.
Thanks to the capabilities of the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation, engineers were able to reveal what happens at the heart of a black hole. Their project generated regarding 10 terabytes of data over a period of regarding five days. A conventional computer would have needed more than a decade to do this. To do what? Simulating a camera – but the result would be the same for a daring astronaut – breaking the event horizon of a black hole.
To make the experiment even more spectacular, the researchers chose a supermassive black hole. It has 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun. This is a black hole in the middle of The Milky Way looks like. Smaller black holes with a few tens of solar masses generate stronger tidal forces that can tear apart objects approaching them even before they reach the event horizon. Astrophysicists talk regarding spaghettiization.
The extremely dramatic event where a camera falls into a black hole.
The event horizon of the simulated black hole extends over a length of around 25 million kilometres. It is just over 15 percent of the distance between Earth and Sun. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas, the accretion disk, surrounds it and serves as a visual reference as it falls toward the black hole. The same applies to the light structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from the light that has orbited it one or more times. A background of starry sky seen from Earth completes the scene.
The videos begin while the camera is at a distance of regarding 400 million miles. As the camera approaches the black hole, it accelerates to speeds ever closer to the speed of light. Like the sound of an oncoming racing car, the glow of the accretion disk and the stars in the background intensifies. It all gets more and more distorted, creating more images as their light moves through an increasingly distorted space-time.
In real time, the camera takes regarding three hours to reach the event horizon. On the way there, she completes almost two complete courses. But for anyone observing from a distance, the camera would never reach the event horizon. Because as space-time would distort, the camera’s image would slow down and then appear to freeze just before that. For this reason, astronomers originally called black holes “frozen stars”.
© J. SCHNITTMAN, B. POWELL, GODDARD SPACE FLYCENTER, NASA- DISCOVER THE COSMOS SURROUNDING FROM INSIDE A GIGANTIC BLACK HOLE WITH 360° VISION.
When the event horizon is reached, even spacetime flows inward at the speed of light. Then the camera and the spacetime in which it moves hurtles towards the center of the black hole – a one-dimensional point called a singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to apply. Destruction of the camera by spaghettisation then takes no longer than 12.8 seconds. And she only has 128,000 kilometers left, which she must cover in no time to reach the singularity.
Time no longer passes in the same way when you approach a black hole.
An alternative scenario has been proposed by NASA engineers. One where the camera covers the event horizon black hole just missed. And the physicists explain that if an astronaut had followed the camera and then returned to the mother ship, which had remained in the protection of the black hole, he would have returned 36 minutes younger than his colleagues. Because time slows down near a strong gravitational source and when it moves close to the speed of light.
The repeated experiment with a black hole rotating as fast as the black hole in the movie “Interstellar” would even allow the daring astronaut to return several years younger than those left in the distance.
Editorial: Futura, written by Nathalie Mayer.
Cover image: © vuang, Adobe Stock – NASA invites us to dive into the heart of a supermassive black hole with a series of visualizations. This also includes videos that enable 360° exploration of space.
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