No one knows what would happen if you fell into a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way. To answer this question, NASA researchers created a simulation using the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Climate Simulation Center that describes what would happen if you fell into a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way .
The black hole at the center of the Milky Way was photographed by the Event Horizon Telescope, showing a doughnut-shaped mass of glowing gas, called an accretion disk, spinning around in the dark void.
The video captures the view as a person falls straight through the accretion disk of glowing gas surrounding a supermassive black hole. The view changes as the person falls, first gliding through the particles of light flying around the black hole, then finally reaching the event horizon, where the sky narrows and the blackness begins to close in, where not even light can escape.
After falling through the event horizon, the observer would be destroyed by gravity in just 12.8 seconds. A few microseconds later, the extremely compressed matter would reach the singularity, the center of the black hole. The journey from the event horizon to the singularity is 128,000 km long, but it happens in the blink of an eye.
It took the researchers five days to render the simulation, using just 0.3% of Discover’s processing power. But if you were to create the simulation on a regular laptop, it would take more than a decade.