Since its discovery, black holes have always fascinated humans because it is impossible to reach a cosmic body with intense gravity. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has released a 360-video that shows what it’s like to dive into a black hole, from where even a ray of light cannot return.
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The video, which is one minute and seventeen seconds long, provides viewers with an immersive experience to understand what lies at the heart of a black hole. The immersive visualization of the journey into the ‘void’ was created by Goddard scientists on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
This video will help viewers imagine what the journey to emptiness is like. The video takes viewers to the event horizon, also known as the black hole ‘surface’. The horizon marks the outer edge of the black hole.
The video project was completed by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in collaboration with scientist Brian Powell.
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What is a black hole?
According to NASA, a black hole is a celestial body with an extremely strong gravitational pull that does not allow even light to pass through it. The surface of a black hole is known as the event horizon. This is a limit beyond which even light cannot exit the black hole. Matter and radiation fall in, but they cannot get out.
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About NASA’s video of falling into black hole
The destination of the video is a supermassive black hole, similar to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Since it is not possible to even see a black hole (because light cannot escape its surface) an accretion disk around the black hole has been taken as a virtual reference during infall. The accretion disk is a flat, rotating cloud of hot, glowing gas. Another circle of photon rings near the black hole serves as another reference point for viewers.
The creation of the video generated approximately 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to half the estimated textual content in the Library of Congress. The spectacular scene was complimented by the music of “Beautiful Awesome”, composed by David Husband and James William Banbury.
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Published: 07 May 2024, 02:54 PM IST
