NASA Simulations Flight Around a Black Hole: Explained

This new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer represents a scenario where a camera — a stand-in for a daring astronaut — just misses the event horizon and slingshots back out. Goddard scientists created the visualizations on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating. A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene. The project generated about 10 terabytes of data — equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress — and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop. Read more: Music credit: “Beautiful Awesome,” David Husband and James William Banbury [PRS], Universal Production Music “Awakening Yearning,” David Ashok Ramani and Jonathan Elias [ASCAP], Universal Production Music “Dawning,” Lorenzo Castellarin [BMI], Universal Production Music Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center /J. Schnittman and B. Powell Producer: Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) Visualizer:Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC) Science writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park) Computer support: Brian Powell (NASA/GSFC) Editor: Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) This video can be freely shared and downloaded at While the video in its entirety can be shared without permission, the music and some individual imagery may have been obtained through permission and may not be excised or remixed in other products. Specific details on such imagery may be found here: For more information on NASA’s media guidelines, visit If you liked this video, subscribe to the NASA Goddard YouTube channel: Follow NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center · Instagram · Twitter · Facebook: