A stunning new animation from NASA shows the mesmerizing dance of two monster black holes revolving around each other.
The black holes – each containing millions of times the mass of the sun – are shrouded in bright, hot, swirling gas called an accretion disk. The new animation shows how the black hole duet distorts and redirects light from each other’s accretion disks. As one black hole passes in front of another, gravity distorts the light of its companion, creating a succession of entangled arcs of glowing gas as if seen in a funhouse mirror.
“We see two supermassive black holes, a larger one with 200 million solar masses and a smaller companion that weighs half,” Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a NASA statement“These are the kind of black hole binary systems that we think both members can maintain accretion disks that last millions of years.”
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The team created the new visualizations using software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to calculate how the light from the accretion disks moves around the two accompanying black holes.
In NASA animation, the accretion discs of black holes are displayed in different colors, showing the difference in temperature and making it easier to follow the light sources as they spin and wind around each other. The smaller black hole experiences stronger gravitational effects, producing higher temperatures and heating the gas in its accretion disk. In turn, hotter gas emits light closer to the blue end of the spectrum, while the accretion disk of the larger black hole appears in red, according to the statement.
Seen from the side, the gas in the accretion discs looks brighter on the left than on the right because of the effects of Einstein’s theory of relativityThe left side appears brighter as the glowing gas spins towards the viewer, while the gas on the right appears slightly fainter as it moves away. In the animation, the black holes also appear smaller as they approach the viewer and larger when they leave – a phenomenon known as relativistic aberration. However, according to the statement, these disruptive effects cannot be seen if you look at the system from above.
In addition, gravitational lenses – what happens when one object acts as a lens and magnifies and distorts the images of another object behind it – creates rings of light around each black hole. As the two black holes orbit each other, strong gravitational forces and the effects of relativity disrupt the light from the black holes, so that when viewing a black hole from above, you can see a small, sharp image of its orbiting companion. on the statement.
“A striking aspect of this new visualization is the self-similar nature of the images produced by gravitational lenses,” Schnittman said in the statement. “Zooming in on each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly distorted images of its partner.”
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