Simulation of Falling Into a Black Hole

Continuing on the cosmic theme of my last post, I wanted to talk about black holes. I saw this really cool simulation taken from the point of view of someone being pulled toward a black hole.

The comments led me to a page from JILA, the joint physics institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder & the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

 Journey into a Schwarzschild Black Hole

This page has several animations and steps describing the process of approaching the event horizon of a black hole. It also outlines the weird breakdowns of physics that happen in these exotic anomalies in space-time.

I took a screenshot of the video below for the beginning of this post, as the black hole distorts and warps the light coming from the galaxy behind it.

My first exposure to the science of black holes was my high school physics class & Stephen Hawking's classic "A Brief History of Time". This book explores the deepest mysteries and most mind-boggling discoveries in physics, especially cosmology, in terms most people can understand. The insights into the theories of relativity and the nature of reality were true mind-openers for me.

The Mystery is Endless. For every explanation we create about The Universe, several more questions will be created. This is not a source of despair- but a profound realization of the fractal, practically infinite detail & scale of our world.