A stunning new animation from NASA shows the fascinating dance of two black monster holes orbiting each other.
Black holes – each containing millions of times the mass of the sun – are shrouded in a bright, hot, agitated gas called a storage disk. The new animation shows how black hole the duet distorts and redirects the light emanating from the other’s storage disks. As one black hole passes in front of the other, its gravity distorts the light of its companion, creating a sequence of tangled arcs of bright gas, as if seen in a mirror of amusement.
“We see two supermassive black holes, one larger, with 200 million solar masses, and a smaller companion, which weighs in half,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. said in a NASA statement. “These are the types of black hole binary systems in which we believe both members could maintain accumulation disks for millions of years.”
Related: 10 huge discoveries of the black hole in 2020
The team created the new visualizations using software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to calculate how the light on the storage disks moves around the two accompanying black holes.
In the NASA animation, black hole accumulation discs they are presented in different colors, which represents the temperature difference and makes it easier to track light sources as they twist and rotate around each other. The smaller black hole has stronger gravitational effects, which produce higher temperatures, heating the gas in its storage disk. In turn, the hotter gas emits light closer to the blue end of the spectrum, while the accumulation disk of the larger black hole is displayed in red, according to the statement.
Viewed from the side, the gas in the storage discs looks brighter on the left than on the right due to the effects of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The left side appears brighter as the glowing gas rotates toward the viewer, while the gas on the right side appears slightly weaker as it moves away. In animation, black holes also appear smaller as they approach the viewer and larger as they move away – a phenomenon known as relativistic aberration. However, these distortion effects are not seen when viewing the system from above, according to the statement.
More, gravitational lens – which occurs when an object acts as a lens, enlarging and distorting 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 in the black holes, so when you view a black hole from above, you can see a small, side view of its orbiting partner. , according to the statement.
“A striking aspect of this new visualization is the self-similar nature of the images produced by gravitational lenses,” Schnittman said in a statement. “The magnification of each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly distorted images of his partner.”
Follow Samantha Mathewson @ Sam_Ashley13. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.