360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges Into a Black Hole
This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — enters the event horizon, sealing its fate. This version is a 360-degree video that lets viewers look all around during the one-way trip.
Goddard scientists created the visualizations on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
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 our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating.
A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene.
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.
-
4:19
Outer Space
24 days agoNASA Simulation’s Plunge Into a Black Hole: Explained
1392 -
0:30
SpooksatNight
23 days agoFall Into a Black Hole: NASA's Mind-Bending Simulation
6 -
0:44
RT
19 days agoNASA releases video of falling into supermassive black hole
5.27K38 -
1:43
Outer Space
1 month agoNASA Animation Sizes Up the Biggest Black Holes
2031 -
36:47
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
22 days ago $0.73 earnedQuasar Cannons & Black Hole Tech
1.25K2 -
33:47
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
12 days ago $26.48 earnedKugelblitz Black Holes
49K15 -
0:52
Cryptostreets
1 month agoCosmic Cannons: Astrophysicists Shed New Light on Black Hole Jets
601 -
1:24
Mbkitchenette
1 month agoEntering in a black hole? Approaching bad weather rain and hail
28 -
10:14
Veritasium
25 days agoSpinning Black Holes
15 -
1:32
B.C. Begley
1 month agoAstronomers spot a massive ‘sleeping giant’ black hole less than 2,000 light-years from Earth
58