NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center recently released a stunning video of a simulated flight through and around a black hole in the universe.

A black hole is the point in space-time at which the gravitational forces are so great that nothing – not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light – can escape from it.

The video shows the basic features of a black hole, with the camera entering the ‘event horizon’ – a boundary in spacetime, through which matter and light can only pass inward for the black hole’s mass. Nothing, not even light, can escape from within the event horizon.

The camera dives into a hypothetical supermassive black hole 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy

A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called the accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during its “fall” into it.

At the same time, bright structures called photon rings form closer to the black hole one or more times.

A scene of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the flight simulation.