Ever wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole?

Thanks to an immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return. The visualizations are available in multiple forms. Explainer videos act as sightseeing guides, illuminating the bizarre effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Versions rendered as 360-degree videos let viewers look all around during the trip, while others play as flat all-sky maps. To create the visualizations, Schnittman teamed up with fellow Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data — equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress — and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop. The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Links:
New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink