Stunning visualization shows 2 black holes in cosmic dance | Space earthsky.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from earthsky.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration captured the world’s imagination in 2019 with a mind-bending photograph of a supermassive black hole’s shadow at the heart of galaxy M87. Imagine the light show from two such monsters locked in a space-warping dance, distorting and redirecting light emitted from the super-heated gas swirling in the accretion disc that surrounds each one. That’s what researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center set out to accomplish with a computer visualisation showing two gravitationally bound supermassive black holes, one with 200 million times the mass of of the Sun and the other weighing half as much. A desktop computer would have taken about 10 years to complete the calculations behind the animation, but using the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Centre for Climate Simulation, it took about one day. The result is mesmerising:
Key facts: The system, also called TIC 168789840, is the first known sextuple composed of three sets of eclipsing binaries, stellar pairs whose orbits tip into our line of sight so we observe the stars alternatively passing in front of each other. Each eclipse causes a dip in the system’s overall brightness. Astronomers designate the binaries by the letters A, B, and C. The stars in the A and C systems orbit each other roughly every day and a half, and the two binaries orbit each other about every four years. The B binary’s members circle each other about every eight days, but the pair is much farther away, orbiting around the inner systems roughly every 2,000 years. The primary stars in all three binaries are all slightly bigger and more massive than the Sun and about as hot. The secondaries are all around half the Sun’s size and a third as hot.