What Would It Look Like To Fall Into a Black Hole? 154
CNETNate writes "A new video simulation developed by Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on New Scientist today, shows what you might see on your way towards a black hole's crushing central singularity. Hamilton and Polhemus built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and the video produced allows the viewer to follow the fate of an imaginary observer on an orbit that swoops down into a giant black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the sun, about the same size as the hole in the centre of our galaxy. The research could help physicists understand the apparently paradoxical fate of matter and energy in a black hole."
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Black holes have an infinite radius (Score:5, Informative)
Infinite radius would assume that time and position in space is NOT granular.
If even time is granular, Tipler's Omega Point theory could not work.
Same Guy, Cooler Graphics (Score:5, Informative)
The same person (Andrew Hamilton) is behind this website:
Inside Black Holes [colorado.edu]
Which has a lot cooler CG.
That animation IS NOT new (Score:5, Informative)
There's a nice site about black holes: http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml [colorado.edu]
It contains simple videos of what happens when you fall into a black hole. They are just animated GIFs, because this site existed long before YouTube and Flash movies.
Re:Black holes have an infinite radius (Score:5, Informative)
It would take a long time from your point of view, on the outside. It would happen pretty fast for the sap who fell in.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't expect you'd see anything, since even light would be pulled into the center. No grid at all, nothing on which to gauge the distortions.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Informative)
I can report with certainty that this was rendered (or at least CAN be rendered) on a modern laptop; I attended Professor Hamilton's course on Black Holes in which he used the Black Hole Simulator. It ran at this quality in real-time (including changing angles, time dilation, and different types of black holes) on a 2005 Alienware laptop running Gentoo.