Astronomers have spotted something way the heck out there, but even their smartest computers can't figure out what it is. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey
Still, say they were… and say we could hop aboard the
Enterprise and make the entirely questionable decision to warp on over to a binary supermassive black hole system. What would it look like?
Video of The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes
Simulation of two supermassive black holes orbiting each other. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell
This is not just CGI, it s a simulation based on solving the actual equations of the Theory Relativity, the laws that tell light how to behave in the presence of the immense gravity of black holes. Solving them for a single black hole is difficult though it s been done before but doing for two is far harder. Still, this is what it would look like if you were there.
Any object with mass warps space-time but this only really becomes apparent for very dense objects, like stars, galaxy clusters, and black holes. Last year for Black Hole Week, NASA released an incredible visualization of how the extreme gravity of a black hole distorts and redirects our view of the light coming from the accretion disk around it. For this year s Black Hole Week, NASA has gone one better and released a stunning visualization of how this effect would appear if there were two orbiting supermassive black holes hundreds of million times heavier than the Sun.
The visualization was created by the same team using the Discover supercomputer and shows the real physics of space-time distortions due to extreme gravity. The two black holes are shown with accretion disks, a donut of gas and dust and material that surrounds the black hole, from which they feed. In the video, we see the black holes orbiting each other from above, to begin with. The accretion disks are colored red
The Light-Bending Dance of Binary Black Holes
New visualization traces how black holes distort, redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas.
Image Credit:
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A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization.
The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas called an accretion disk that surrounds each one.
Viewed from near the orbital plane, each accretion disk takes on a characteristic double-humped look. But as one passes in front of the other, the gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a rapidly changing sequence of arcs. These distortions play out as light from both disks navigates the tangled fabric of space and time near the black holes.