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.