What Would It Look Like To Fall Into a Black Hole?

CNETNate writes "A new video simulation developed by Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on New Scientist today, shows what you might see on your way towards a black hole's crushing central singularity. Hamilton and Polhemus built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the video produced allows the viewer to follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole."

Comments

I thought it was April 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did a Goatse story get on the front page?

Huh?

[Jack9]

I don't assume you see red grid lines?

Re:Huh?

[AvitarX]

Probably while your still pretty far away, you see a white light, and ancestors calling.

Re:Huh?

[FST777]

According to the TFA, the red grid marks the event horizon as the "falling" observer would see it. Later on, you see a white grid, which marks the event horizon as distant observers see it.

Re:Huh?

[interkin3tic]

I would have assumed you would see a completely black grid on a completely black background.

Re:Huh?

[Jack9]

I don't expect you'd see anything, since even light would be pulled into the center. No grid at all, nothing on which to gauge the distortions.

Re:Huh?

[lastchance_000]

You'll probably be eaten by a grue.

Re:Huh?

[nanospook]

The very last thing you would see is a Walmart floating by..

hmm, I see

[jollyreaper]

So falling into a black hole looks and awful lot like a slashdotting. Good to know!

Re:hmm, I see

[mikiN]

The Slashdot Paradox:

Getting first post on Slashdot while falling into a black hole.
Cynical phycisists might call that an extremely slow news day.
Other physicists might remark that now there are 2 things which can escape from a black hole: Hawking radiation and Slashdot posts.

Re:hmm, I see

[lordofthechia]

There's an alternate simulation here.

Re:hmm, I see

[Weaselmancer]

Another simulation here.

What does it look like?

[tnk1]

It looks like you are seriously fucked.

Re:What does it look like?

[schmidt349]

What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.

Academician Prokhor Zakharov
"For I Have Tasted The Fruit"

What it's like

[BobGregg]

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

I think it's a lot like that.

Re:What it's like

[orangesquid]

$ /usr/games/bsd/nethole

** You are in a maze of twisty little distorted images, all alike.

** You have been eaten by an event horizon.

$ # dammit

I already saw it

[OglinTatas]

back in 1979.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078869/
man, that V.I.N.CENT. was such a character!

Black holes have an infinite radius

[MichaelSmith]

...and a finite circumference. An observer falling towards the singularity would feel the local gradient in the gravitational field increase as they fall, probably to the point where staying in one piece becomes a challenge. This would go on for a long time from their POV.

Re:Black holes have an infinite radius

[Creepy Crawler]

Infinite radius would assume that time and position in space is NOT granular.

If even time is granular, Tipler's Omega Point theory could not work.

Re:Black holes have an infinite radius

[ceoyoyo]

It would take a long time from your point of view, on the outside. It would happen pretty fast for the sap who fell in.

Re:Black holes have an infinite radius

[garlicbready]

This might be completely wrong

I always thought that if you could see the outside universe as you were falling in the outside would appear to be moving faster and faster (from an inside perspective) the closer you got towards the center of the singularity. (effectively skipping ahead into the future faster and faster)

since quite a lot of junk falls into a black hole especially over the period of the universe's lifetime, you'd probably see all sorts of large amounts of crap following in behind you at a tremendous speed (stars etc) until it got close enough to be affected by the same space time distortion, but never quite catching up to your point

from an outside perspective if you could see what was happening beyond the event horizon, the stuff falling in would appear to move slower and slower the closer it got towards the center never quite reaching the center point
which makes me wonder if someone falling into one of these things would actually reach the end of time itself a lot more quickly than everyone else on the outside (assuming there is such a thing)

Simpsons Did It

[rackserverdeals]

Simpsons did it

Re:Simpsons Did It

[buchner.johannes]

Don't say "Simpsons did it", Southpark already did that.

Re:Simpsons Did It

[fractoid]

I'm gonna have to whoosh a whoosh here.

Whooosh! :)

How does it feel?

[Locke2005]

About the same as it feels to be a bug hitting an Audi windscreen on the Autobahn... when you've been stretched to several hundred times your original length, you're most likely no longer capable of observing anything, so it looks pretty much like nothingness. Can a soul escape from the event horizon of a black hole, or is it doomed to spend forever in purgatory inside the black hole? And is that better or worse than being stuck in New Jersey?

Re:How does it feel?

[An ominous Cow art]

Yeah, but you have to get out while you're young, if you're a tramp who was born to run.

Re:How does it feel?

[HTH NE1]

There's always Hawking Radiation.

So that's the source of that Jersey smell?

Same Guy, Cooler Graphics

[lacoronus]

The same person (Andrew Hamilton) is behind this website:

Inside Black Holes

Which has a lot cooler CG.

That animation IS NOT new

[Cyberax]

There's a nice site about black holes: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml

It contains simple videos of what happens when you fall into a black hole. They are just animated GIFs, because this site existed long before YouTube and Flash movies.

Re:In other words

[R3d M3rcury]

True. On the other hand, if I stuck you on the surface of Titan, you'd be dead, too. So it's pretty pointless to envision the surface of Titan or send probes there or anything like that.

Re:In other words

[AKAImBatman]

1. Reaching a black hole is not impossible with current technology, but it is beside the point.

2. This is a research tool intended to help physicists understand what happens to matter as it enters a black hole.

3. Using all your grant money to run on an SGI cluster is so... 1990s. This was probably rendered on a modern laptop. If the calculations really did turn out to be too computationally intensive for a modern personal computer (I wouldn't count on it), they would have bought time on one of the more modern Linux or Mac computing clusters.

4. "Cool" is not the purpose. If it was, there wouldn't be fun guide-lines left in the film. This is a research tool that happened to get passed on to NewScientist to share with anyone who might be interested.

Re:In other words

[DRJlaw]

Once you came near the event horizon (given current technology) you would more than likely be dead, so this is a pretty pointless video...

Pointless unless you've studied relativistic physics, in which case the video is a modernized version of the classic thought experiment "Einstein's Train.". Everyone involved would be pretty dead if the train was moving at speeds fast enough to introduce relativistic effects perceptable by the ordinary senses, yet the illustration aids in an understanding of the physics.

The article is quite clear:

That's where visualisations like this might just help. "Close to the singularity, it appears that the entire three-dimensional universe is being crushed into a two-dimensional surface," says Hamilton (see Our world may be a giant hologram). But whether it hints that a 2D view is more fundamental is not yet clear. "Does it have any profound significance? I don't know..."

The death of the hypothetical observer is irrelevant to the usefulness of the video.

Re:In other words

[linzeal]

Figuring out the Riemann geometry for this was non-trivial and should be lauded not dismissed as some trivial "cutesy video".

erm...

[M-RES]

...dark?

The other view

[t3sser4ct]

If you were falling into a black hole, I think it would be far more interesting to do so while facing away from the hole, as this would theoretically (according to relativity) allow you to witness the remaining life of the universe played out at a greatly accelerated rate.

Re:In other words

[rts008]

This was probably rendered on a modern laptop.

After finding this website, I would say you are correct.

There is also a "Step by Step into a Black Hole" of similar images as the video in TFA. Worth looking at if this is an interest.

I also found a cool animation of a simulated "Flight through a Wormhole".

It all just seems basic animation. Cool, but nothing really ground breaking.

I imagine that the models used to base the animation on could have taken some resources.

P.S. I would hope the comment you replied to was a failed attempt at humour. Surely he was jesting!

Re:In other words

[amRadioHed]

Depends on the size of the black hole. For a large black hole you would make it past the event horizon before the gravitational gradient is strong enough to tear you apart.

Re:In other words

[khellendros1984]

You're quite correct that making a video and sending a probe are two entirely different things. I somehow doubt that the video took a few hundred million to make, while still providing a potentially useful visualization of something that I somehow doubt we'll witness first hand.

Re:In other words

[Starmengau]

I can report with certainty that this was rendered (or at least CAN be rendered) on a modern laptop; I attended Professor Hamilton's course on Black Holes in which he used the Black Hole Simulator. It ran at this quality in real-time (including changing angles, time dilation, and different types of black holes) on a 2005 Alienware laptop running Gentoo.