NASA Plunges Us Into A Huge Black Hole In A Massive 10-Petabyte Simulation

The new supercomputer simulation is the best guess we have based on current data. “People often ask about this, and modeling these hard-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to real-world consequences in the real universe,” says astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The picture is broadcast by a virtual camera falling beyond the event horizon with all possible light and visual effects for the observer. For an outside viewer, an object approaching the boundary of the event horizon would turn into “spaghetti” – gravity would stretch it along with space-time. From an outside perspective, the object would remain in this form for an infinitely long time, but for the object itself, life and existence would cease in a matter of seconds – it would be crushed into elementary particles and carried towards the center of the black hole. The virtual camera simulation allows you to enjoy the visual effects after crossing the event horizon until the camera ceases to exist.

Schnittman, who has created several black hole simulations for NASA, based his new work on a supermassive black hole very similar to Sagittarius A*. He started with a black hole with a mass equivalent to about 4.3 million suns and, along with scientist Brian Powell, also of Goddard, fed his data into NASA’s Discover supercomputer.