Nasa has recently unveiled a mind-bending video created using an ultra-powerful supercomputer, showcasing what it would look like to fall into a black hole. The simulation, produced by scientists at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, aims to provide a realistic visualization of the experience beyond the event horizon of a supermassive black hole.

The project, which ran on Nasa’s Discover supercomputer for five days, generated approximately 10 terabytes of data. The simulation explores the universe’s appearance as one ventures into the depths of a supermassive black hole, similar in mass to the one at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who created the visualizations, explained the significance of such simulations. He simulated two scenarios – one where a camera narrowly avoids the event horizon and another where it crosses the boundary, leading to its inevitable fate within the black hole.

The supermassive black hole used in the simulation is comparable in mass to the one in the Milky Way, measuring around 25 million kilometers in event horizon diameter. As the camera approaches the speed of light upon entry, the orange and yellow photon rings surrounding the black hole distort, showcasing the warping of space-time.

Inside the black hole, the visualizations turn black as the camera reaches the singularity, a one-dimensional point. Dr. Schnittman highlighted that once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification occurs in a mere 12.8 seconds.

Nasa also shared another video demonstrating the immense scale of black holes, using the TON 618 black hole to compare its size to that of the solar system. These visualizations help bridge the gap between the theoretical mathematics of relativity and the tangible consequences in the universe, providing a deeper understanding of these enigmatic cosmic phenomena.