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Si tratta di una simulazione creata dal NASA Goddard Space Flight Center per visualizzare cosa accade durante l’avvicinamento a un buco nero supermassiccio, effetti relativistici inclusi.

New, immersive visualizations produced on a NASA supercomputer let anyone take a trip into a black hole’s point of no return.

The visualizations represent two scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and another where the camera enters the event horizon, sealing its fate.

The visualizations are available in multiple forms, including 360-degree videos that let viewers look all around during the trip. Explainer videos act as sightseeing guides, highlighting the bizarre effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Additional versions are rendered as flat all-sky maps.

Goddard scientists created the visualizations on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.

The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating.

A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene.

The project generated about 10 terabytes of data — equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress — and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.

Movies and frame sets are available below. For more detailed information using specific frames, see Beyond the Brink: Tracking a Simulated Plunge into a Black Hole. Some numbers to think about:

• The outer edge of the accretion disk extends to a radius of about 97 million miles (156 million kilometers), comparable to the distance between Earth and the Sun.
• The inner edge of the accretion disk starts at a radius of around 23 million miles (38 million kilometers), about 25% of the Earth-Sun distance.
• The radius of the photon ring is 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers).
• The event horizon radius is about 7.8 million miles (12.5 million kilometers).
• Spaghettification occurs around 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) from the singularity, the center of the black hole.

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