× ABOUT THE FLIGHT
One horizon. This flight uses a non-spinning Schwarzschild black hole with M87's estimated mass. The thin, visible disk and blue-white polar jets are artistic choices inspired by M87. Real M87 has spin and a different accretion flow. The jets have a bright spine, luminous knots and a softer sheath; their light follows the same curved paths as the disk. Their color, scale and plasma Doppler brightness are illustrative, not a measured reconstruction or a magnetic plasma simulation.
You coast without thrust. Free fall produces zero felt acceleration, even as your speed and the separation between clocks grow. Tidal forces are a separate readout.
Cinema / Physics changes the spectral shifts and visible brightness. The ray tracer follows Schwarzschild light paths down to its validated limit. The deepest view uses the approximation described below. The flight ends at a small radius before the singularity, where the classical model diverges.
*The disk beacon is a proxy at the peak-temperature radius with zero axial impact parameter. It is not a tracked disk feature. Automatic exposure measures average visible luminance and adapts within fixed limits.
Controls: Space to pause, R to restart, drag to look, D to cycle labeled debug views. Sandbox thrust: W/S, A/D, Q/E. Reduced-motion preferences are respected.
Optional audio depicts the cabin and controls; it is artistic sound design, not a recording or sonification of the black hole. Cabin vibration is a camera effect representing machinery, with stronger vibration under sandbox thrust. It adds no gravitational waves to the model. Reduced motion is respected unless you turn cabin vibration on.
M87* by the numbers
Mass 6.5 billion solar masses (EHT, ±0.7 billion)
Distance 16.8 megaparsecs, about 55 million light-years
Event horizon radius (2GM/c²) 1.9 × 10¹³ m, about 128 AU: over three times Pluto's average distance from the Sun
Photon sphere 1.5 horizon radii, where light can circle the hole
Innermost stable circular orbit 3 horizon radii for a non-spinning hole
Light-crossing time of the horizon radius about 17.8 hours Questions Would you feel anything crossing the event horizon of M87*? No. Free fall feels weightless, and a black hole this massive barely stretches you at the horizon: the tidal difference across a 2 m body is about 5 × 10⁻¹¹ g. Smaller black holes are the ones that spaghettify you before you reach the horizon.
How long does the fall take after crossing the horizon? About 11.9 hours of ship time from horizon to singularity for a ship that fell from rest far away, two-thirds of the horizon's light-crossing time. No path inside lasts longer than about 27.9 hours (πGM/c³).
Why does home never see the ship cross? Light leaving the ship near the horizon is delayed and redshifted without limit. A distant observer sees the ship slow, dim and redden toward the horizon and never sees it cross, while the ship crosses in finite proper time.
Is this what M87* really looks like? No. The simulator uses a non-spinning Schwarzschild black hole with M87*'s mass. The thin bright disk and blue-white jets are artistic choices inspired by M87; the real hole spins and is surrounded by a hot, thick flow that the Event Horizon Telescope imaged as a ring 42 microarcseconds across.
What physics does the simulator compute? Ship motion along Schwarzschild geodesics in Painlevé-Gullstrand (river) coordinates, light paths ray traced through the curved spacetime on the GPU, aberration, gravitational and Doppler frequency shifts, the ship and distant clocks, and tidal gradients. It runs in WebGL2.
Mass, distance and ring size: EHT Collaboration 2019, Paper VI . Horizon, photon sphere, orbit and timing figures are derived from that mass with the Schwarzschild formulas. More: how stars become black holes · engineering and science cheatsheets · all cheatsheets .
Cabin sounds generated locally with Sony AI Woosh-DFlow , edited by David Veksler with ffmpeg. Model weights: CC BY-NC 4.0 .
Jet reference: NASA, M87’s two jets (reviewed October 6, 2026). Model references: Hamilton & Lisle · Bruneton . Built by David Veksler.
Below r = 0.05, the view holds ray geometry at the last validated radius. Aberration and brightness evolve analytically with the ship's Lorentz factor. This deepest view is approximate; all clocks and tidal readouts follow the full trajectory.