It is believed that being inhaled by a black hole would be one of the most painful deaths in the universe.
Just like any other object, you will be violently elongated, like what astrophysicists call the noodle process.
Now, an incredible new animation from NASA shows what we will see in our final moments if we can reach such a void.
The animation, made on NASA's supercomputer, shows a first-person "event horizon" toward a supermassive black hole — its terrifying no-return rush.
Although it does not show a specific black hole, it is roughly equivalent in size to a monster black hole located at the center of our galaxy.
NASA scientists created the animation on the Discover supercomputer at NASA's Climate Simulation Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The project generated about 10 terabytes of data, equivalent to about half of the text content estimated by the Library of Congress.
"This new immersive visualization made on NASA's supercomputer presents a scene where one of the cameras just misses the event horizon and is ejected," the space agency said.
"The destination is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.3 million times that of our Sun, the equivalent of a monster black hole at the center of our galaxy."
As the video starts and the "camera" approaches the void, we can see the bright orange "accretion disk" – the hot gas disk that surrounds the black hole and its main source of light.
An accretion disk is formed by the release of energy when matter falls into a black hole, whether it is gas, dust, or matter.
We can also see a thinner sphere of photons—a thin ring of light closer to the black hole's "event horizon."
The term "event horizon", which became famous in 1997 for the sci-fi disaster movie of the same name, refers to a location from which anything, not even light, can escape.
The event horizon of the simulated black hole spans about 16 million miles (25 million kilometers), or about 17% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
After posting the video, netizens described the video as "impressive", "beautiful", and "so cool".
One of them commented: "Black holes are such a fascinating part of space that I think they're pretty cool, but they evoke deep fear in my heart." ”
Another said, "Why does this feel scary, it's like instinctively making me avoid it." ”
Another person said, "It's like I was almost swallowed up by a cosmic vortex," and another person joked, "Go back at full speed!" ”
According to NASA, assuming that the "camera" provides a first-person view, the speed is greatly accelerated - it successfully reaches 60% of the speed of light.
The camera should represent the perspective of an astronaut if we can reach the black hole, which is not possible at the moment.
Xavier Calmet, a professor of physics at the University of Sussex, said the gravitational pull of a black hole would become so strong that we would experience "noodle".
"Your body will be pulled into a shape that resembles a long noodle until it is torn apart by the powerful gravitational force," Professor Calmet told MailOnline.
"I can't imagine it being pleasant – it can happen fairly quickly, so it's unlikely to last long if it's painful."
Dr David L Clements, a senior lecturer in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said that if you fall into a black hole, "the end could be very fast".
"If the atmosphere is stripped away, it can lead to suffocation, or through a process known as noodleization, where everything is stretched in long strings – perhaps briefly painful," he said.
Fortunately, the chances of the Earth being swallowed by a black hole are "almost zero", according to Dr. Clements.
"The fact that we're still here suggests that this hasn't happened in the entire history of the planet," he told MailOnline.
The closest black hole to Earth, known as Gaia BH1, is about 1,600 light-years away from Earth and 10 times the size of our Sun.
Researchers recently revealed the closest known black hole to Earth, about 1,500 light-years away.