Dance of Binary Black Holes tagged posts

The Light-Bending Dance of Binary Black Holes

 Extreme gravity of two orbiting supermassive black holes distorts our view. In this visualization, disks of bright, hot, churning gas encircle both black holes, shown in red and blue to better track the light source. The red disk orbits the larger black hole, which weighs 200 million times the mass of our Sun, while its smaller blue companion weighs half as much Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

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 ...

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