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Over the last year, U. Mass Dartmouth physicsist Gaurav Khanna and his colleagues have been using a high-powered platform of computers to simulate the interior of a rotating black hole.

Although moviegoers have been treated to a view of the interior maelstrom in the popular film Interstellar, scientists have actually never been able to simulate the inside of a black hole until now.

The good news is that, theoretically, using a black hole as a portal to other points in the universe could be possible.

“This has never been done before,” Khanna told me in an email, “although there has been lots of speculation for decades on what actually happens inside a black hole.”

The problem is challenging. Together with Lior M. Burko, professor at the School of Science and Technology, Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville, Georgia; and Anil Zenginoglu of the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, University of Maryland; Khanna developed several new mathematical and computational techniques which they applied with the help of Khanna’s unique Sony Playstation based array of processors.

According to the U. Mass press release:

They used a linear model, which allows them to simulate the early portion of the inner horizon of an old black hole, very much like the black hole shown on Interstellar. For the first time it became possible to see how physical fields blow up on the approach to the singularity. The simulation shows that the singularity is weak, in the sense that while the gravitational tidal forces blow up, they do so fast enough that their interaction with physical objects is still bounded, such that the latter may arrive intact to the singularity.

In essence, Khanna et al have shown that space travel, or more accurately spacetime travel, via black hole could work. Their simulation is certainly consistent with any number of science fiction novels in which black holes are used as portals for the adventurous.

Their paper is just published in Physical Review.

Computer models are, of course, limited by their nature. Khanna’s simulation captures some of the features of the physical system, the early phases of the singularity, but it is by no means a complete rendering.

More complex models need to be tried, he said. And one major challenge, for example, is how the features of the singularity would be modified by quantum gravity, a theory that is still yet to be fully worked out by physicists.

“I expect this to be a new additional area of focus for my research program over the next several years,” said Khanna.

Of course, this still leaves unsolved the problem of how to transport astronauts to the nearest useful black hole. But that’s a problem for engineers….