Check Out This Amazing Light-Warping Dance Between Two Black Holes

The immense gravity of each black hole distorts light from the other’s accretion disk, creating a “funhouse mirror” effect.

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:03 The light bending gravity of a black hole needs no introduction, but

00:08 have you ever wondered what would happen if two black holes got thrown together?

00:13 NASA has released a visualization of two supermassive black holes

00:17 locked in a binary orbit.

00:20 The simulation made by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA's

00:24 Guttered Space Flight Center shows how each black hole,

00:28 millions of times bigger than the sun, distorts light emitting from the other's

00:33 accretion disk, the hot gas surrounding it.

00:36 The colors aren't just for show.

00:38 The gas around smaller black holes would most likely be hotter and

00:42 emit light near the blue end of the spectrum.

00:46 The extreme gravity distorts the light coming from different parts of the disks,

00:50 resulting in a warped image.

00:53 According to Schnittman,

00:54 zooming into each black hole reveals multiple increasingly distorted images

01:00 of its partner.

01:01 Schnittman used NASA's Discover supercomputer to make the simulation,

01:05 since the calculations needed would have taken a modern desktop computer

01:10 about ten years.

01:11 [MUSIC]