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No human being will ever encounter a black hole. But we can\u2019t stop wondering what it would be like to fall into one of these massive, beguiling, physics-defying singularities. <\/p>\n
NASA created a simulation to help us imagine what it would be like. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Jeremy Schnittman is an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and he created the visualizations. \u201cPeople often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera \u2014 a stand-in for a daring astronaut \u2014 just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate.\u201d<\/p>\n In one, the viewpoint plunges directly into the black hole like a free-falling astronaut, with explanatory text to guide us through what we\u2019re seeing. The other is a 360-degree view of the black hole. <\/p>\n Schnittman created them with a NASA supercomputer called Discover in only five days, generating about 10 terabytes of data. The computer used only about 0.3% of its power. The same visualization would\u2019ve taken more than a decade to create on an average laptop computer. <\/p>\n \n