Black hole X-ray emissions explained by astronomy simulations With the help of a supercomputer, this is what NASA thinks the inside of a black hole looks like. Courtesy NASA WANT to know what the inside of a black hole looks like? Put aside a few minor complications, such as been torn down to your component particles, and take NASA's simulated ride to the event horizon. Take a look at a black hole, and you will see what you expect: A black hole. After all, black holes are the ultra-dense remains of collapsed stars, which shrink from up to 20 times the size of our sun down to objects less than 120km wide and have such intense gravity that not even light escapes. Slap on some x-ray vision glasses - as in the above video - and you will see they are not entirely "dark." Clouds of gas spinning around the cosmic drainpipes become compressed as they spiral inward - reaching temperatures of up to 12 million C, some 2000 times hotter than the sun. While this does not produce a visible spectrum of light, It does produce a swirling swathe of low-energy X-rays. What puzzled astronomers was the burst of hard X-rays being emitted shortly before the gas reached the point of no return: the event horizon. For such hard X-rays to form, gasses would need to reach temperatures in the billions of degrees. A team of researchers including NASA created a detailed simulation of black hole physics inside a supercomputer. The results - as well as providing the most accurate "look" at a black hole so far - exposed how the swirling gas was accelerated to near the speed of light once it reached the corona. The corona is a region just before the black hole's event horizon - the point where everything (including light) cannot escape gravity's grasp. At this velocity, the magnetic and electric turbulence in the gas helped generate a billion-degree corona above and below the swirling disk. When a "soft" X-ray strikes one of these superfast particles, it is spat out of the orbit of the black hole as one of the previously unexplained "hard" X-rays. The upshot of the story? Escaping the pull of the event horizon will be the least of the worries for any blackhole skimming spaceship. These billion-degree toasters will have you fried long before you get anywhere near it.