Flight Around a Black Hole

May 12, 2024

Scientists at NASA used their Discover supercomputer to create a new immersive visualization, simulating a scenario where a camera—acting as an adventurous astronaut—narrowly avoids the event horizon and swings back out. This 360-degree video lets viewers explore the surroundings throughout the journey.

Produced at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, the visualization takes viewers to a supermassive black hole that's 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun—akin to the one at the core of the Milky Way. For simplicity, the black hole doesn't rotate in this model.

Surrounding the black hole is an accretion disk, a flat, spiraling cloud of hot gas that provides a visual guide during the fall. Closer in, photon rings—formed by light orbiting the black hole multiple times—further enrich the view. The star-filled sky seen from Earth provides the backdrop.

Generating this visualization took about 10 terabytes of data, roughly half the text content of the Library of Congress. Over five days, it ran on just 0.3% of Discover's 129,000 processors—a task that would take over ten years on a typical laptop.

Read the full article at NASA: New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink

The video above is intended for educational purposes and does not constitute or imply an endorsement by FutureForAll.org.