NASA's first-person simulation shows what it would be like falling into a black hole

We've all heard about the possibility at school or through films, getting sucked into a black hole would be one of the most torturous and painful deaths in the universe.

But there's so much more to be known about black holes, seeing as we only captured our first photo of one about five years ago.

Several will wonder what it's actually like to fall into one, if it's as bad as it sounds, and how it looks.

Well, count on NASA to take advantage of technology to put together a highly advanced simulation of the process:

This brand new animation, which was uploaded to YouTube yesterday (6 May), showcases exactly how terrifying it would be to fall into the dark abyss of a black hole.

The highly advanced video took just five days to put together on just 0.3 percent of the 129,000 processors that are part of NASA's Discover supercomputer, located at the NASA centre for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland.

A regular laptop would have taken over 10 years to go through the same process, as over 10 terabytes of data would have needed to be processed.

In the video, we approach a supermassive black hole that has a mass 4.3 million times greater than our Sun, comparative with the colossal black hole located in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

The simulation was incredibly detailed. (NASA)

The event horizon (aka the point of no return) spans approximately 16 million miles, or around 17 percent of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

Physics professor at the University of Sussex, Xavier Calmet, said that the gravitational force of a black hole would become so intense that we would experience something called 'spaghettification'.

"Your body will be stretched into a shape similar to that of a long pasta until it is reaped apart by the strong gravitational force," he told The Daily Mail.

Sounds lovely.

The space agency further explained the video: "This new, immersive visualisation produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out."

At the start of the video, we approach the void, seeing the bright orange 'accretion disk', which is a hot disk of gas that orbits the black hole, acting as its main source of light.

It's made up of various material that emits energy, as it falls into the black hole, whether it's gas, dust or matter - also seen is the thinner proton sphere, a thin ring of light formed near the black hole's event horizon.

As we enter the black hole, we begin to spin as all light around us looks like it's bending as we move further and further from any trace of light for eternity.

Everything looks warped and becomes distant once you get sucked in. (NASA)

NASA say that the video is largely sped up, reacting about 60 percent the speed of light to show the process in just about a minute - with the viewpoint meant to represent the perspective of an astronaut if humans were ever able to reach a black hole.

Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, explained: “If you have the choice, you want to fall into a supermassive black hole.

“Stellar-mass black holes, which contain up to about 30 solar masses, possess much smaller event horizons and stronger tidal forces, which can rip apart approaching objects before they get to the horizon.”

Topics: Space, NASA, Science, Technology

Joshua Nair

Joshua Nair is a journalist at LADbible. Born in Malaysia and raised in Dubai, he has always been interested in writing about a range of subjects, from sports to trending pop culture news. After graduating from Oxford Brookes University with a BA in Media, Journalism and Publishing, he got a job freelance writing for SPORTbible while working in marketing before landing a full-time role at LADbible. Unfortunately, he's unhealthily obsessed with Manchester United, which takes its toll on his mental and physical health. Daily.

@joshnair10