When two orbit supermassively black holes get closer to each other, the results can be quite twisted. A new view of NASA shows how the irresistible attraction of the extreme gravity bends and distorts the light in the bright rings of hot gas that surround the black holes in a simulated binary system.
The animation shows two black holes: the largest of the pairs, which is about 200 million times larger than our sun, is surrounded by red rings of hot gas called the accumulation disk. The orbit around this giant is a second black hole that weighs about half that mass, and its gas and dust rings are illustrated in bright blue.
Strong gravitational forces pull and deform the fabric space time as one black hole orbits the other, bending the light from the shining discs of the dance partners. And the closer you get to one of these deformed giants in the simulation, the more contorted the other appears, NASA representatives he said in a statement.
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“The magnification of each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly distorted images of its partner,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
The gravitational pull from the center of a black hole is so irresistible that not even light can escape. At its center is a dark region of infinite density known as singularity, bordered by the horizon of events. Even outside the event horizon, gravity bends photons in a curve known as the photon sphere. Spinning around that sphere are the overheating gas and dust rings of the storage disk, which spin at incredible speeds and spit. electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays, radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays.
The view begins with a top view of the smaller black hole orbiting the largest. At first, neither seems too affected by the other’s proximity, but this changes dramatically as the point of view moves toward the orbital plane. Now, when one black hole passes in front of the other, the light on the background object breaks and wraps to follow the gravitational distortion. The visibly bright colors in the view are artistic choices, as the accumulation discs in the supermassive black holes would emit light in ultraviolet spectrum range. In the less massive black hole – the blue one – the gas in the disk would burn a little hotter than in the heavier black hole, according to the statement.
To create the simulation, Schnittman calculated how the light produced on the storage disks would curve around the deformed fabric of space-time during the black hole dance. He calculated the frame-by-frame movements in about a day, using the Discover supercomputer cluster at NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation at GSFC, according to the statement.
It is believed that most large galaxies have a supermassive black hole – one that is millions or even billions of times more massive than our sun – at their center. Binary systems for these monster black holes arise from collisions in the galaxy, although in most cases the black holes spiral together so that only a fraction of the combined galaxies hold two orbiting black holes, NASA reported in 2018. In such systems where both black holes are supermassive, this distortion of the fun mirror of bright light could persist for a very long time, Schnittman said in the statement.
“These are the types of black hole binary systems in which we believe both members could maintain accumulation disks lasting millions of years,” he said.
Originally published on Live Science