Fall Into a Black Hole in Mind-Bending NASA Animation (Video)
DannyB writes:
Fall into a black hole in mind-bending NASA animation (video)
"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole."
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole, NASA has your answer.
A visualization created on a NASA supercomputer to celebrate the beginning of black hole week on Monday (May 6) takes the viewer on a one-way plunge beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
This outer boundary of a black hole marks the point at which not even light moves fast enough to escape the black hole's intense gravitational pull. That means the event horizon, marked by a golden ring outside of the heart of the black hole, is the point of no return past which no distant observer can ever recover information.
[....] What is interesting is that if you have the choice of what black hole to tumble into, bigger is better.
"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole," Schnittman said. "Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon."
[....] The more mass a black hole has, the further from its singularity its event horizon is located. That means with a supermassive black hole, an infalling astronaut would have the chance to pass the event horizon before meeting their grisly fate.
[....] After a real-time duration of around 3 hours and 30-minute during two orbits of the black hole, we reach its event horizon. This marks the last point at which any distant observer watching our descent would be able to see us. They would forever see our image at the very edge of the event horizon, frozen.
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