When two supermassive orbits black holes getting close to each other, the results can be quite distorted. A new NASA visualization shows how the irresistible extremes pull gravity bends and distorts light into the glowing rings of hot gas surrounding 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 with hot gas called a growth disk. Around the giant orbit is a second black hole that weighs about half the mass, and its gas and dust rings are illustrated in bright blue.
Powerful gravity pulls the tissue of space-time while one black hole revolves around the other and bends the light of the dance partners’ glowing growth disks. And the closer you get to one of these crooked giants in the simulation, the more distorted the other, NASA representatives, appear. said in a statement.
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“By zooming into every black hole, several, increasingly distorted images of his partner are revealed,” Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement.
The force of gravity in the middle of a black hole is so irresistible that not even light can escape. 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. Rotating around the sphere are the accumulator’s rings of overheated gas and dust, which rotate and spit out at incredible speeds electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays.
The visualization begins with a top view of the smaller black hole that revolves around the larger one. At first, one of the two does not seem to be greatly influenced by the proximity of the other, but this changes dramatically as soon as the point of view shifts to the orbital plane. When one black hole now passes in front of the other, the light curls from the object and rotates it to follow gravity distortion. The visibly glowing colors in the visualization are artistic choices, as growth disks in supermassive black holes light up in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. In the less massive black hole – the blue – the gas in the disk would burn slightly hotter than in the heavier black hole, according to the statement.
To create the simulation, Schnittman calculated how light produced in the growth disks during the dance of the black holes would bend around the skewed tissue of space-time. He calculated the frame-by-frame motions within about a day using the Discover supercomputer group at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at GSFC, according to the statement.
It is believed that most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole – millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun – in their center. Binary systems for this sample of black holes are the result of galaxy collisions, although in most cases the black holes spiral together so that only a fraction of merged galaxies retain two black holes in orbit, NASA reported in 2018. In such systems where both black holes are supermassive, this distortion of glowing light can continue for a long time, Schnittman said in the statement.
“These are the kind of black-hole binary systems where we think both members can maintain growth disks for millions of years,” he said.
Originally published on Live Science