When two supermassive orbiting the Earth black holes getting close together, the results can be quite warped. A new NASA visualization shows the irresistible appeal of extreme gravity bends and distorts the light in the glowing rings of hot gas that orbit the black holes in a simulated binary system.
The animation shows two black holes: the largest of the pair, which is about 200 million times the mass of our sun, is surrounded by red rings of hot gas called an accretion disk. Orbiting that giant is a second black hole weighing about half that mass, and its gas and dust rings are illustrated in bright blue.
Powerful gravitational forces pull and twist the fabric space time while one black hole revolves around the other, bending the light from the glowing accretion disks of the dance partners. And the closer you get to one of these twisted giants in the simulation, the more twisted the other appears, NASA representatives said in a statement
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“If you zoom in on each black hole, you see multiple, increasingly distorted images of its partner,” Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement.
Gravity in the center of a black hole is so irresistible that not even light can escape. At the core is a dark region of infinite density, known as the singularity, bounded by the event horizon. Just outside the event horizon, gravity bends photons in a curve known as the photon sphere. Around that sphere the rings of the accretion disk of superheated gas and dust spin, swirling at incredible speeds and spitting electromagnetic radiationsuch as X-rays, radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays.
The visualization starts with a top view of the smaller black hole orbiting the larger one. At first, neither seems to be much affected by the proximity of the other, but that changes dramatically once the viewpoint shifts to the orbit plane. Now as one black hole passes in front of another, the light from the background object twists and turns to follow the gravitational distortion. The visibly glowing colors in the visualization are artistic choices, as accretion disks in supermassive black holes would emit light into the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. In the less massive black hole – the blue one – the gas in the disk would burn slightly hotter than in the heavier black hole, the statement said.
To create the simulation, Schnittman calculated how light produced in the accretion disks would bend around the warped fabric of space-time during the dance of the black holes. He calculated the frame-by-frame movements in about a day, using the Discover supercomputing cluster at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at GSFC, the statement said.
Most major galaxies are believed to have a supermassive black hole – one millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun – at their center. Binary systems for these monster black holes are created by collisions between galaxies, although in most cases the black holes spiral into each other, so that only a fraction of the joined galaxies have two black holes orbiting Earth. NASA reported in 2018. In such systems where both black holes are supermassive, this funhouse mirror distortion of incandescent light can last for a very long time, Schnittman said in the statement.
“These are the types of black hole binary systems that we think both members can maintain accretion disks that last millions of years,” he said.
Originally published on Live Science