A beautiful new animation from NASA shows the enchanting dance of two monster black holes in an orbit around each other.
The black holes – each containing millions of times the mass of the sun – are shrouded in clear, hot, burning gas called a growth disk. The new animation shows how the black hole duet distorts and diverts light emanating from each other’s growth disks. As one black hole passes in front of the other, its gravity turns on the light of its companion, creating a series of tangled arcs glowing gas as if seen in a mirror of the funhouse.
“We see two supermassive black holes, one larger with 200 million solar masses and one smaller companion that weighs half as much,” said 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 where we think both members can maintain growth disks for millions of years.”
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The team made the new visualizations using software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to calculate how light travels from the growth disks around the two companions’ black holes.
In the NASA animation, the black holes growth discs are shown in different colors, which represent the difference in their temperature and make it easier to locate the light sources as they rotate around each other. The smaller black hole experiences heavier gravity effects, producing higher temperatures, which heats the gas in its accumulator disk. In turn, warmer gas emits light closer to the blue end of the spectrum, while the growth disk of the larger black hole is displayed in red, according to the statement.
Seen from the side, the gas in the drive discs looks brighter on the left than on the right due to the consequences of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The left side looks brighter as the glowing gas turns towards the viewer, while the gas on the right side looks slightly dimmer as it moves away. In the animation, the black holes also appear smaller as they approach the viewer and become larger as they move away – a phenomenon known as relativistic deviation. However, according to the statement, these distortion effects are not seen when you see the system from above.
What’s more, gravity lens – which occurs when one object acts like a lens and enlarges and distorts the images of another object behind it – creates light rings around each black hole. As the two black holes orbit each other, strong gravitational forces and the effects of relativity distort the light from the black holes so that you can see a small view of the orbit when you see a black hole from above. to the statement.
“A striking aspect of this new visualization is the similar nature of the images made by gravity lens,” Schnittman said in the statement. “To zoom into every black hole reveals several, increasingly distorted images of his mate.”
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