NASA Released A New Black Hole Simulation And It's Mesmerizing

A few months ago, the world learned about the first image ever captured of a black hole, done by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. The image was one of the most remarkable achievements in the area of science in the last ten years. It took a gigantic amount of smarts and data to produce such that blurry orange photo.

However, we all have to agree that despite how great the achievement is, the photo did not offer much for us to look at. But that’s been changed with the new visualization from NASA.

Behind the mesmerizing visualization is Jeremy Schnittman, who used custom software at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the space agency. The result is a reminiscence of the Gargantua black hole from Interstellar crossed with the EHTs image, demonstrating the impact of the galactic gravity sinks on the spacetime surrounding them.

Black holes are regions of space that are extremely dense featuring huge gravitational pull, not even light can escape from black holes. Debris, dust, and gas which a black hole’s gravity pulls swing around if it’s trapped in an incredibly hot, insanely fast carousel. The carousel is the part of the black hole that we can see, also called the accretion disk. The image can be skewed depending on which angle you see it from.

The visualization NASA created shows us the disk from an edge-on angle, which means the light you see at the top of the picture actually comes from behind the hole. From this image, you can also see that matter is far brighter on the left side and the right side as it is moving to us. This cosmic phenomenon is “Doppler beaming,” in which the level of brightness rises for the light that moves in this way, and the opposite is true if it moves away from the viewer.