Featured Image Credit: @ScienceClicEN / YouTube / Flavio Coelho via Getty
When you might picture a black hole you might imagine pitch blackness.
After all, the swallowing hole is devoid of any air, life or light - that really just leaves pure darkness.
But journeying through space to a black hole is something else. The whole experience is quite eery.
A YouTube video titled 'Falling into a realistic black hole | 360° VR' by ScienceClic English shared a simulation that shows what we would see if we were to fall into a black hole.
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Just take a look at this!
The fall duration is realistic for a black hole with 30,000 solar masses, a Schwarzschild radius of 100,000 km, and starting from a distance of 3 million km.
As you fall, a vortex of blue light sweeps past until you are eventually engulfed in complete darkness.
Make sure to have your sound turned on as it adds to the terrifying, first-hand experience.
But what makes this video unique to the other simulations is the 360-degree viewpoint from the viewer. YouTube's tech allows you to use arrow keys to pause the video and look around you as you slowly sink deeper into an abyss.
The video stops when we hit the central singularity.
'Nearly had a panic attack had to pause it,' one YouTube user replied.
'Watching this with a VR headset is perhaps one of the scariest feelings ever. Similar to falling into a gas giant in VR, which freaked me out,' wrote a second user.
'Nearly had a heart attack why are black holes so scary!' another exclaimed whilst one individual found it a mix of positive and negative emotions saying: 'That was at once beautiful and terrifying'.
The scientific YouTube channel has built a reputation around educating its audience on complex topics that can be hard to comprehend without visualisation.
Even worse, another video by them delves into a full-blown explanation of what would happen to your body as you cross the horizon. And boy, is it grim.
Interestingly, as ScienceClic notes, at no point does it appear that you're actually entering the black hole.
Even when fully inside, the black hole's image only takes up 15% of your field of view, as 'the rest is still filled with stars.'
One user remarked: 'There's something very haunting about passing the event horizon, knowing you'll never return, but seeing the spaceship you came from getting larger as if you were being given a second chance to reconsider.'
