File:NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink (SVS14576 - Plunge Rectilinear Still 03528).jpg

English: Camera plunge, equidistant rectangular projection. This all-sky movie follows the plunge of a simulated camera into a non-rotating supermassive black hole. The object's mass is 4.3 million Suns, equivalent to the black hole lying at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The orange structure surrounding the black hole represents the hot, glowing gas of its accretion disk, where infalling matter collects and slowly spirals inward. Interior to the disk is a thin set of photon rings, which are images of the disk produced by light that has orbited the black hole one or more times before reaching the camera. The camera completes almost two orbits before hitting the event horizon. During the journey, a variety of effects caused by the gravitationally warped space-time around the black hole and the camera's speed become increasingly apparent. Images of the disk and the background sky morph, duplicate, and even form mirror images. Structures in the direction of travel, at the center of the simulation, brighten greatly as speed increases. At 42 seconds, the camera crosses the event horizon, traveling ever closer to the speed of light. Due to the camera’s speed, the entire sky appears to shift progressively forward, shrinking before our eyes. After entering the event horizon, the camera would be destroyed by tidal forces 12.8 seconds later, then in microseconds rush to the singularity, a point in the black hole's center where the laws of physics as we know them no longer apply. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman and B. Powell