360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole

This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out. This version is a 360-degree video that lets viewers look all around during the trip.

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.

Music credit: "Beautiful Awesome,” David Husband and James William Banbury [PRS], Universal Production Music

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell
Producer: Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Visualizer:Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)
Science writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Computer support: Brian Powell (NASA/GSFC)
Editor: Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)

Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

[yuukashima]

That jet black darkness staring right at me is quite scary

[himeoftwili]

Oh I haaate this.. Black Holes are such a fascinating part of space, and i find them insanely cool, but man do they unlock a deep fear within me.

[Rodri-mjkh]

Why does this feel scary, like my instinct kicks in to avoid this

[noah-battlegroundsmobileindia]

Atleast I'll be listening to some music while Im falling, that certain.

[vikramsc]

Slowed it down to 0.5, music off, using VR, it genuinely felt scary for a moment.

[babayaga]

It's like a deep state of meditation where you will find nobody

[arushigoel]

Oddly this doesn't scare me. I think if I could just experience this, see this in reality, I would go even if I could never come back

[dgfhszdr]

Thanks for spending some Discovery time for our edutainment. Have you, or would you consider running it in other spectra, or visualising gamma emissions / Hawking etc?

[imjensen]

Like I nearly went down a cosmic drain. Beautiful.

[quirrel_dynasty]

Im confused why people find it scary?, i think it looks cool.

[dixielovekamp]

I love this kind of stuff. I could watch this all day

[korak_korek]

it made me feel goosebump. how small we are in this universe

[genericgymvlogsph]

Absolutely amazing!!! Thank you for everything you do NASA!!

[esterester]

it's strike a fear i can't explain ✨

[gangadharr]

No use, just graphics... no-one knows what will happens.

[TechSkill-ED]

Why this is scary to me!?
I just made a mistake of clicking that we are vr option it scared me so badly

[tatis]

Faltou um corrimão na entrada para evitar acidentes.

[zukilover]

I love blackholes, and this video is incredible, well done 👍😊😊

[Sent-Elias]

Меня это почему то не пугает. Захватывает, создает состояние невесомости и полета, увлекает до самых пяток)).До крутейшего восторга!!!Но у меня вопрос, в итоге то, куда наблюдатель попадает? В антивселенную?

[necrisro]

This would go really well with Outer Wilds theme song