[Music throughout]
Have you ever wondered what it would look like to fly into a black hole?
So, what is happening here?
This is a simulation of a flight into a supermassive black hole surrounded by a hot, glowing disk of gas.
The thin inner circle is called the photon ring. It’s an image produced by light that has orbited the black hole one or more times before escaping.
This oval, centered on the camera’s direction of travel, shows the entire simulated sky.
Camera position and orientation relative to the black hole.
For the camera, time slows compared to that of a faraway observer.
The camera is aiming at the photon ring’s far side. It’s now moving so fast that the simulation slows for a better view.
The camera’s speed causes light sources directly ahead to brighten greatly.
The camera begins its 10-minute plunge to the event horizon.
The camera hits the event horizon ...
now.
Light from the outside universe still shines in, but can never leave.
The camera is destroyed. Microseconds later, it reaches the singularity.
A closer view shows just how layered and intricate the photon ring is.
Each band is a distorted image of the gas disk layered between the background sky.
Successive bands are thinner, produced by photons that have taken an additional trip around the black hole before reaching the camera.
Due to the camera’s speed, the entire sky appears to shift progressively forward. The sky is shrinking before our eyes.
On a typical laptop, computing this simulation would have taken more than a decade.
The Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center performed the feat in 5 days ...
... using only 0.3 percent of its processing power.
NASA