The picture is broadcast by a virtual camera that falls behind the event horizon with all possible light and visual effects for the observer. For an outsider, an object approaching the edge of the event horizon would turn into spaghetti, as gravity would stretch it along with space-time. To an outsider, the object would remain in this form for an infinitely long time, but for the object itself, life and existence would cease in a matter of seconds-it would be ground into elementary particles and carried to the center of the black hole. Virtual camera simulation allows you to enjoy visual effects after crossing the event horizon until the camera ceases to exist.

The second video shows a flight around the event horizon at a safe distance and how the appearance of the sky and accretion disk changes as the black hole is flown around at light speed in the region of spacetime distortion. After a couple of rounds, the astronaut piloting the ship would return to his comrades 36 minutes younger than they are, because time slows down when traveling at near-light speeds. They would have aged, but he would not.

NASA’s simulation was created for a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. Its event horizon extends over 25 million kilometers. The video begins at a distance of 640 million kilometers from the black hole and shows a journey that would take about three hours in real time. During the simulation, the NASA Discover supercomputer worked for five days and created more than 10 TB of data.

This is a great material for demonstrating to ordinary people processes that do not fit in their heads. Christopher Nolan set a good example in his movie Interstellar by inviting Kip Thorne, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize with two other colleagues for the discovery of gravitational waves, to visualize the effects of a black hole. In this regard, the 2014 sci-fi movie anticipated NASA’s efforts to visualize flights near a black hole, but NASA’s video certainly captures as accurately as possible the visual experience that could accompany such a voyage.