What happens when you fall into a supermassive black hole?
NASA researchers used a powerful supercomputer to simulate a journey past the event horizon. This visualization reveals the visual distortions an astronaut would encounter while approaching a black hole with the mass of the one at the center of our galaxy.
The simulation depicts a non-rotating black hole containing 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. As the camera approaches, it passes a glowing accretion disk of hot gas and distinct photon rings created by light trapped in orbit. The project required 10 terabytes of data, which is comparable to half the text held by the Library of Congress.
Running the simulation required 5 days of processing time using a small fraction of the capacity available on the Discover supercomputer. While this task occupied only 0.3% of the machine's 129,000 processors, a standard laptop would require over ten years to complete the same complex calculations.
Source: NASA Simulation’s Plunge Into a Black Hole: Explained
