27-04-09 Astronomers take virtual plunge into black hole

Dare to fall into a black hole and you would get vaporized in what is probably the most violent place in the universe.But the journey would yield some amazing sights,though you might need three eyes for the best view of what's going on,new research suggests.Humans have only gotten close to black holes in sci-fi books and movies.In fact,astronomers can't even see black holes directly,though there is strong evidence millions of them exist in our galaxy alone.Scientists can try to simulate a trip inside with the help of equations in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity,which make predictions about black hole behavior,said Andrew Hamilton,a professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder."Black holes are some of the simplest things in the universe.We think of them as being complicated things because they're described by complicated mathematics," Hamilton said."But as a practical matter,they are,in fact,much simpler than the sun,far simpler than stars and infinitely simpler than human beings." Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus,a physics teacher in Fort Collins,Colorado,set out to visualize what an "infaller" might see if he or she were swallowed by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.The results are described in a recent paper and shown in a simulation that took more than 100,000 lines of computer code to create