NASA simulation showing a flight around a black hole leaves viewers with 'a fear they can't explain'
A NASA simulation showing a flight around a black hole has left viewers with ‘a fear they can’t explain’.
The immersive visualization was produced on a NASA supercomputer and uploaded to YouTube earlier this year.
In the simulated footage, viewers can watch a scenario where a camera ‘just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out’.
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The video shows a 360 degree view of what it would look like to fly right past the black hole, allowing viewers to look all around during the trip.
The simulation was created by Goddard scientists on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.
In the video description, NASA explained: “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.”
People took to the YouTube comment section to share their reaction to the simulation, with people sharing their thoughts on how the video made them feel ‘uneasy’.
One user wrote: “That jet black darkness staring right at me is quite scary.”
Another said: “Why does this feel scary, like my instinct kicks in to avoid this.”
A third agreed, adding: “It strikes a fear I can't explain.”
And a fourth person commented: “Cool yet deeply unsettling.”
However, not everyone was freaked out by the video, with one user writing: “I think it’s a bit odd how people find this simulation scary. to me it’s quite comforting. black holes are friend shaped.”
And another person agreed, sharing: “There’s a lot of things I would do and give up to be allowed to go this way.”