What's inside a black hole? NASA's simulation may throw some light

Representative image of a black hole. Photo: NASA

Astrophysicists and scientists around the world have for long struggled with the question: what happens when someone dives into a black hole?

For many sci-fi fans, the scene from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar would come to mind, in which Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper decides to jump into the black hole to fetch data that could help save people on earth.

However, that won’t be the only reference point anymore for visualizing black holes.

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has now produced an immersive visualization on a supercomputer through which viewers can jump into the event horizon, which is known as the black hole’s point of no return, the US space agency said on May 6.

In the visualization, the simulation tracks a camera that “approaches, briefly orbits, and then crosses the event horizon” of a massive black hole, much like the one at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. In the simulation, the final destination is a massive blackhole, which has a mass 4.3 million times the Sun.

The simulation provides a 360-degree view during the flight along with multiple explainer videos to make it easier for everyone to understand the effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, NASA said.

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“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,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualizations.

“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 team of Schnittman also teamed up with fellow Goddard scientist Brian Powell and used the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.

According to NASA, the project produced 10 terabytes of data, which is equal to approximately half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress. The space agency also said that it ran for 5 days on just 0.3 percent of Discover’s 129,000 processors, a feat that would have taken over a decade on a typical laptop.