NASA on Thursday released a video showing two massive black holes in space dancing around each other and distorting themselves in curved, enchanting colors. The two black holes get their shapes, and their solitary colors, and drift apart before strong gravitational forces re-collapse them into more multicolored, slinky-like shapes before reshaping.
The visualization by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created in a movie to show what two black hole disks could create if it happened in space. For reference, the two objects shown in the visualization are millions of times larger than the earth. One of the objects is 200 times larger than the sun, while the other one is larger than the sun.
Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, created this visual image. He believes these binary systems stay ‘millions of years’ together.
“We see two supermassive black holes, a larger one with 200 million solar masses and a smaller companion that weighs half as much,” Schnittman said. “These are the kind of black-hole binary systems where we think both members can maintain growth disks for millions of years.”
Photo Snapshot of NASA Video
The views are seen from a plane of rotation, and the views show the bulging, successive arcuate shapes that can make some massive black holes as they pull toward each other.
“These distortions play out as light from both disks navigates the jumble of space and time near the black holes,” NASA said on its website.
Next, wax plates are said to create a brilliant display of red, orange and blue colors while creating higher temperatures, reflecting reality through the colliding gases.
“Warmer gas emits light closer to the blue end of the spectrum, and materials orbiting smaller black holes experience gravitational effects that produce higher temperatures,” the NASA statement said. “For these masses, both growth disks will emit most of their light in the UV, with the blue disk reaching a slightly higher temperature.”
The discs in the video spin back into their own shapes and orbits, and then strike each other again to re-create the rotating, bumpy arcs before going back into their own, separate orbits.
“A striking aspect of this new visualization is the similar nature of the images produced by gravity lens,” Schnittman said. “To zoom into every black hole reveals several, increasingly distorted images of his mate.”
Schnittman said he calculated light paths from the disks as they moved through the ‘skewed space-time around the black holes,’ according to NASA.
Schnittman has depicted these two supermassive black holes spiraling into unity, and astronomers predict that they will see something like this happen in the near future, giving them the opportunity to study the gravitational waves of these ripples.