Nasa video shows how you’ll be spaghettified when you fall into a black hole
Nasa has used its powerful supercomputer to reveal what it would look like to be sucked into a supermassive black hole.
The team at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland produced the simulation on Discover to create a visual of what would appear beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
Dr Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist who created the visualisations, said: ‘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.
‘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.’
The horizon is an outer boundary where not even light can move fast enough to escape the black hole’s intense gravitational pull. It is marked by a golden ring outside of the heart of the black hole.
But in this simulation, these rings become distorted as the camera enters a place in the universe where time is warped.
The project took only five days to run on the space agency’s Discover computer, and produced around 10 terabytes of data.
Inside the hole, the camera goes black as it reaches a one-dimensional point called a singularity.
The gravitational forces increase to the point that any object is stretched vertically and squashed horizontally, in a term known as ‘spaghettified.’
The black hole simulated is equivalent to the one at the heart of our Milky Way, which is roughly 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun.
The simulated hole horizon measures around 25 million kilometres (16 million miles), and the camera approaching it is travelling at the speed of light.
Five facts about black holes you might not know
- The closest black hole is around 1,500 light years away and is called Gaia BH1
- Black holes spin, with the fastest known as GRS 1915+105 which clocks in at over 1,000 rotations per second.
- The lightest-known black hole is around 3.8 times the Sun’s mass.
- The first time a real image of a black hole was shown in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope shared an image of M87
- If the Sun was replaced with a black hole of the same mass, everything would be colder but the planets would stay in the same orbit.
Other supermassive black holes are much bigger, with some equivalent to billions of suns.
And it’s the bigger holes you want to fall into.
Dr Schnittman said: ‘If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole.
‘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.’
The more mass a black hole had, the further the event horizon is located.
In a supermassive black hole, a person unlucky to catch themselves in that position, would at least get to see past the event horizon before becoming spaghettified.