What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole?
This image from a
supercomputer visualization
shows the entire sky as seen from a
simulated camera
plunging toward a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, similar to the
one at the center of our galaxy.
The camera lies about 16 million kilometers from the
black hole’s
event horizon and is moving inward at 62% the
speed of light.
Thanks to
gravity’s funhouse effects, the
starry band of the
Milky Way appears both as a compact loop at the
top of this view and as a secondary image
stretching across the bottom.
Move the cursor over the image for additional explanations.
Visualizations like this allow astronomers to explore
black holes in ways not otherwise possible.