The New NASA Supercomputer Simulations Show Us What It Would Be Like To Fall Into a Supermassive Black Hole

Supermassive black holes are known to be able to devour entire stars and warp the very fabric of spacetime with its undeniably huge mass and gravitational influence. The incredible potency and enigmatic presence of black holes have captivated the minds of scientists and entertainers throughout many ages like Albert Einstein to Christopher Nolan. They have endeavoured in order to make the unimaginable comprehensible through their groundbreaking research and works of audiovisual art. 

Now, the latest set of NASA supercomputer simulations is giving the public an opportunity to see the influence of these cosmic leviathans very close by. They will do this by showing them what it would be like to travel through the event horizon of a supermassive black hole which has a mass equivalent to 4.3 million Suns. 

“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,” explained NASA astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who were dedicated to create the visualisations. “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 simulations were created by Schnittman and fellow NASA scientist Brian Powell and according to the agency it would have taken a regular laptop around 10 years to tackle the monumental task. But this task was done by Discover’s 129,000 processors in just five days using just 0.3 percent of its computing power.

The simulation’s singularity was made to mimic the immense mass of Sagittarius A*, the colossal supermassive black hole residing at the middle of the Milky Way. Schnittman said the vast size of this black hole could offer a potential advantage to astronauts, helping their survival until they reach the event horizon. But, once they pass this threshold, they would go through spaghettification which is a gruesome process of being stretched and torn apart. 

“The risk of spaghettification is much greater for small black holes on the order of the mass of our sun,” said Schnittman. “For those, tidal forces would indeed rip apart any normal spacecraft long before it reaches the horizon. For supermassive black holes like Sgr A*The horizon is so large, it looks and feels flat, just like a ship on the ocean doesn’t risk ‘falling over the horizon,’ even though it could easily fall over a waterfall on a small river.”