The abyss at the edge of human understanding – a voyage into a black hole

Even if you were flying in the most sophisticated interstellar craft and wearing the snazziest futuristic spacesuit imaginable, a journey into a black hole would almost certainly be your last trip anywhere. Mercifully for anyone intrigued by the idea of such a voyage, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have developed this simulation of what, to the very best of our knowledge, it would look like if a camera approached and plunged through the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. This version of the video simulates the experience of being sucked into the cosmic abyss before walking viewers through the Universe-bending hard science of it all. The resulting visuals are both awesome and deceptively simple – the result of a NASA supercomputer spitting out some 10 terabytes of data in a process that would take a normal personal laptop roughly a decade.