A new visualization created by NASA shows what it would look like to fall into a black hole.
Created on a NASA supercomputer, the program is to kick off the beginning of black hole week.
Check out the video below:
The simulation takes the user on a one-way plunge beyond the horizon of a black hole and into the abyss.
The outer limit of a black hole highlights the point at which not even light moves fast enough to escape the back hole's dramatic gravitational pull, meaning the event horizon, which is distinguished by a golden ring outside of the heart of the black hole, is the point of no return past from which no distant observer can ever recover information.
In the second simulation, the user takes a ride around the event horizon, challenging the notions of time and space.
"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," creator Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.
"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," he further explained.
"If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole."
Falling toward the heart of the black hole, the gravitational forces multiply to the point where tidal forces are so severe that an object is stretched vertically and squashed horizontally.
This causes the object, be it a star or an astronaut, to be turned into a noodle, or "spaghettified."
Obviously, it's no secret that this process will kill any human that encounters it.
The simulations begin around 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away from the target as it dashes into the supermassive black hole at speeds approaching those of light. As the black hole fills the user's view, the light from the matter surrounding it becomes more extreme, according to Space.com.
Before the event horizon and the photon ring are reached, the plummeting astronaut meets a flattened cloud of hot and glowing gas called an accretion disk, which moderately feeds the black hole.
The simulations of the black hole and plunge were created using the Discover supercomputer located at NASA's Center for Climate Simulation.
The supercomputer constructed an astonishing 10 terabytes of data, which NASA claims is equivalent to half of the text found in the Library of Congress.
The simulations ran for five days on Discover and made up 0.35 of the supercomputer's 129,000 processors.
A commercial laptop would take somewhere around 10 years to create the same simulations.
