'It can help you figure out how you want to make your way in the world,' she explains, which might aid you in grappling with the other big stuff like work, family, friendships, responsibilities, and more. However, questions that make you think are usually not easy to answer, Kinds says, and one of the most important questions to ask yourself is this: How can you bring meaning to your life? Otherwise, like a plastic bag, we’re just letting ourselves float in the wind.' (Fine imagery for a Katy Perry song, but no way to live your life.) 'It’s important to step back and question what we’re doing and why, and also what we want to be doing and why. 'We don’t really want to be carried from moment to moment simply by the currents around us,' she says. 'Asking yourself questions that make you think can help you get a little more control over life,' says Amy Kind, PhD, philosophy professor and director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont Mckenna College.

'Cause ICYDK, being inquisitive can actually make you feel a bit better about, well, everything. But sometimes, you gotta resist the urge to ~tune it all out~ and instead, get curious.

Journal reference: American Journal of Physics ( DOI: 10.1119/1.Yes-it’s tempting to stay surface level when the world is already a pretty darn serious place. In a simulation mimicking such unhindered freefall, the light of the entire universe appears concentrated into a bright ring once you reach the middle of the black hole. The intense gravity makes background stars appear redder because it saps the energy of photons passing near the event horizon the photons stretch to longer, redder wavelengths as they “climb out” of the gravitational trap.īut this effect is counteracted by your speed when you’re falling freely towards a black hole – travelling at nearly the speed of light, stars in the black hole’s backdrop turn bluer due to the Doppler effect. “It’s as if the black hole is like a mirror.”Īs well as accounting for gravitational lensing, the simulator shows how star colours would change near a black hole. “The constellation approaches the black hole, then you see stars like Betelgeuse – the left shoulder of Orion – appear twice, on the right and left sides of the black hole,” Müller told New Scientist. In the background, the constellation Orion moves towards the black hole from the right, then gets shredded and spun around. This example simulation shows the view while orbiting a black hole at a radius five times larger than the event horizon. The light of background stars distorts as it passes close to the event horizon. Users can choose their distance from a black hole, then go into orbit or plunge straight in.Īt the start of each tour, you see a black circle that marks the hole’s event horizon – the boundary from which nothing, not even light, can escape. The program incorporates the real positions of around 118,000 stars mapped by the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos satellite. Now Müller and Stuttgart colleague Daniel Weiskopf have gone a step further, creating a program that lets you alter various inputs to tour a black hole’s environs. Last year, scientists at the University of Colorado demonstrated a video of what you’d see if you fell into a black hole. Even at a safe distance from the black hole, its gravity can distort the apparent positions of background stars, an effect called gravitational lensing.

“It’s useful for people to play around with the parameters to study how, for instance, a black hole would distort the constellation Orion,” says Thomas Müller of the University of Stuttgart in Germany.Ī black hole forms when a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the core collapsing to a point with huge density and an enormous gravitational pull. The program’s creators say it could be an excellent tool to familiarise people with the weird ways that black holes warp light. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine. A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole.

Going into a black hole simulation