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May 8, 2024 3:44 AM

360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges into a Black Hole answers the question of what it would look like to fall into a black hole. If you’d rather not, NASA also released 360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole. They also released videos explaining what is going on in the visualizations for the dive into the black hole as well as the flight around it. The press release has more information.
posted by Kattullus (9 comments total)

Life goal: do not fall into a black hole.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:09 AM on May 8 [7 favorites]

I give you two choices:

One is total annihilation. The wand will touch you, and your soul will meet with death.

The second is I use the power of the wand to convert your body into living stardust where your consciousness will be jettisoned into the infinite cosmos ON AN ENDLESS JOURNEY OF WONDER AND DISCOVERY

(Adventure Time is the best)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:22 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

But wouldn't you be vaporized by all the cosmic rays generated by everything else being sucked into the black hole?
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:38 AM on May 8

Even stranger would be an instance where an entire solar system enters the event horizon of a supermassive black hole with enough orbital velocity to just sort of remain in orbit there for a long long long time. Gravity at the event horizon, spanning half a light year for the largest of supermassive black holes, would be close to one G, and you wouldn't even feel the pull once you entered orbit. I'm guessing one side of the sky would be filled with stars, the other would be black where spacetime twists away?
posted by jabah at 7:03 AM on May 8 [2 favorites]

As Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, for any given distance to the object, a star is actually more deadly than a black hole. They get a bad rap for no reason.

Also, the liner notes to the video state, "To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating." As far as we know, all real world astronomical bodies have angular momentum. A non-rotating black hole would rarer than a dropped pencil perfectly balancing on its point. And crucially, real black holes, because of their rotation, don't contain a point-like singularity. (Black holes might not contain "singularities" at all; that's just shorthand for "the math stops mathing.")
posted by xigxag at 12:11 PM on May 8 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but if all those photons go in and none come out, wouldn't the place be lit up inside?
posted by mule98J at 3:14 PM on May 8

I mean, sometimes, you gotta get away from a Gorn ... but you do you ... Gorn feeders.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 3:57 PM on May 8

I'm guessing they just didn't simulate light coming in from most of the sky?

Once you cross the event horizon, your light cone tips over to face the center. It's not the case that you can point away from the black hole but no matter how hard you try, you get sucked in. Instead, every direction you look at is away from the black hole center, but the center is in the future and space is crunching together around you. So it should be the case that inside the black hole, everywhere you looked would be lit up from light falling in.
Weirdly your light cone tips up enough that at some angles you can see events from the future. But you can't send messages it out so it's not an effective time machine.
posted by Humanzee at 4:11 PM on May 8 [4 favorites]

Life goal: do not fall into a black hole.

Sometimes you just take an unfortunate stumble, bruh.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:06 AM on May 11 [2 favorites]