Essential linkage: Scientists model what it would look like to dive into a black hole. neat!
I used to love the Disney sci-fi film The Black Hole. The robots, good and bad, the cheesy effects... the whole shebang.
But it doesn't compare to the trippy piece of footage two scientists have come up with showing what entering a black hole would really look like, as the geek's friend New Scientist reports:
Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time. They 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.
Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, built a computer code based on the equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as a distortion of space and time.
They 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.
And the video is pretty neat, too.
Hmm... trippy.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012