Hollywood aside, there are many things we don’t understand about black holes.
It begins with a camera view where you’re floating toward a black hole.
It delivers a great view of some photon rings before entering the event horizon.
As the camera is sucked in, the simulated sky shrinks.
The simulation then plays again, but with explanations overlaid to explain each step of the process.
That’s way bigger than Earth, and comparable to some black holesin our own cosmic backyard.
In case you, too, want to go flying into ablack hole, Schnittman has some advice.
It took about five days to complete and used just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors.
NASA says the same work would’ve taken about a decade on a regular laptop.
Why work on such a huge and comprehensive simulation of a black hole?
Schnittman says it’s mostly for research.
