NASA used a supercomputer to create this black hole visualization that shows what happens if you fall into the event horizon. This required the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, and the project itself generated about 10 terabytes of data over 5 days.
What you’re seeing here is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the gargantuan beast located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. If you have a choice, falling into a supermassive black hole is the way to go because stellar-mass black holes have much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which tears apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.
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People often ask about this, and simulating these difficult-to-imagine processes helps me connect the mathematics of relativity to actual consequences in the real universe. So I simulated two different scenarios, one where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out, and one where it crosses the boundary, sealing its fate,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
