Despite the fact that black holes are shown in many science fiction films, astrophysicists still do not know what they really look like. It seems that the time of ignorance has partly passed - researchers from the Netherlands performed complex calculations and released a video in which a black hole can be examined in detail inside virtual reality. The project was carried out within the framework of the BlackHoleCam program funded by the European Union for the study of black holes.
Researchers have given humans the opportunity to travel inside a black hole called Sagittarius A *, which is located in the middle of the Milky Way. Based on the data known about it, the paths of movement of light rays that distort the surrounding space were calculated.
Using the image below, the researchers showed how a picture of the universe would begin to look through the eyes of a person falling into a black hole. The first part shows not distorted space: red and green colors indicate what a person sees in front, and yellow and blue - what is behind. In the second part, you can see that the black hole increases the viewing angle - to see what is behind, a person does not even need to turn his head. If a person does not fall into a hole, but resists its attraction, the viewing angle, on the contrary, greatly decreases.
Based on this data, the researchers created a breathtaking video of what a black hole looks like through the eyes of an object it is pulling in. In the case of this video, the object being pulled into the hole is the viewer himself. In the interval from 0:40 to 1:41, the object approaches the black hole - its shadow, visible in the middle, is gradually obscured by streams of hot gas. Further, the viewer is in the maximum proximity to the dense accretion disk, so practically nothing happens before his eyes. At the end of the "journey" a person is carried out of the black hole by one of the polar jet streams.
One of the study's authors, Eino Falke, admitted that they imagined black holes a little differently. The researchers identified two outcomes of their work. First, a closer look gave them a wealth of information to help them understand the fundamental laws of physics. Secondly, the panoramic video made it possible to tell about black holes to a wide audience in the most interesting way.
Ramis Ganiev
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