Plunge: Behind the Scenes Creating NASA's Black Hole Visualization

  • Released Friday, September 26, 2025
View full credits

Plunge into the story behind some of NASA’s most iconic black hole videos!

For Black Hole Week 2024, NASA released new visualizations showing flights around and into a black hole. These visually striking and scientifically accurate products resulted from months of work by a small team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, led by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman 

Now, a new video reveals the backstage story of how these visualizations came about.  

Schnittman developed computer code that models a supermassive black hole, its accretion disk, and its space-warping effects. Using a technique called ray tracing, the code also incorporated a virtual camera that tracked every photon, or particle of light, reaching it back to its source. For these visualizations, Jeremy also moved this camera through space, increasing the level of difficulty.  

One set of visualizations sent the camera on a near-miss trajectory that looped around the black hole and escaped back into space. The other set plunged the camera straight into the black hole along the most direct path possible.  

While his initial low-resolution test frames could be produced on a laptop computer, the final 8k versions required thousands of frames generated by a Goddard supercomputer called Discover. When played back in video form, the complete frame sets showed detailed views of familiar black hole features — as well as some Schnittman had never seen before.  

No project is without some last-minute drama, though. Some frames revealed unexpected issues in the code that the team had to rush to deal with as the May deadline for Black Hole Week 2024 approached.

Watch the full behind-the-scenes video to learn how the team tackled these obstacles in time to produce these jaw-dropping videos.  

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

View the final visualizations here.

Find a short, vertical clip from this video here.

Music: "Beautiful Awesome,” David Husband and James William Banbury [PRS], Universal Production Music
“Games Show Sphere 01,” Anselm Kreuzer [GEMA], Universal Production Music
“Rolling,” Jaremy Aiello and Mike Mullen [BMI], Universal Production Music
“Question Time,” Paul Louis Reeves [PRS], Universal Production Music
“Tactical Analysis,” Clinton Rusich, Matthew St Laurent, Christian Telford, and David Travis Edwards [ASCAP], Universal Production Music
“Games Show Sphere 02,” Anselm Kreuzer [GEMA], Universal Production Music
“Awakening Yearning,” David Ashok Ramani and Jonathan Elias [ASCAP], Universal Production Music
“Tidal Force,” Thomas Daniel Bellingham [PRS], Universal Production Music

Complete transcript available.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. However, individual items should be credited as indicated above.

Series

This page can be found in the following series:

This page was originally published on Friday, September 26, 2025.
This page was last updated on Monday, September 8, 2025 at 12:34 PM EDT.