Black Hole Eye Candy

Black Hole eye-candy, courtesy NASA/Goddard. Awesome says it all.

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.

A face-on view of the system highlights the smaller black hole's distorted image (inset) of its bigger companion. To reach the camera, the smaller black hole must bend light from its red companion by 90 degrees. The accretion disk of this secondary image appears as a line, which means we're seeing an edge-on view of the red companion – while also simultaneously seeing it from above. A secondary image of the blue disk also forms just outside the bright ring of light nearest the larger black hole, too.

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

Stellar to a fault.