New NASA Visualization Probes the Light-Bending Dance of Binary Black Holes
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New NASA visualization probes the light-bending dance of binary black holes:
A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun's mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas-called an accretion disk-that surrounds each one.
Viewed from near the orbital plane, each accretion disk takes on a characteristic double-humped look. But as one passes in front of the other, the gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a rapidly changing sequence of arcs. These distortions play out as light from both disks navigates the tangled fabric of space and time near the black holes.
"We're seeing two supermassive black holes, a larger one with 200 million solar masses and a smaller companion weighing half as much," said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who created the visualization. "These are the kinds of black hole binary systems where we think both members could maintain accretion disks lasting millions of years."
[...] Visualizations like this help scientists picture the fascinating consequences of extreme gravity's funhouse mirror. The new video doubles down on an earlier one Schnittman produced1 showing a solitary black hole from various angles.
[...] "A striking aspect of this new visualization is the self-similar nature of the images produced by gravitational lensing," Schnittman explained. "Zooming into each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly distorted images of its partner."
Schnittman created the visualization by computing the path taken by light rays from the accretion disks as they made their way through the warped space-time around the black holes. On a modern desktop computer, the calculations needed to make the movie frames would have taken about a decade. So Schnittman teamed up with Goddard data scientist Brian P. Powell to use the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation. Using just 2% of Discover's 129,000 processors, these computations took about a day.
1Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization.
Visualization: The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes
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