![]() ![]() The new video doubles down on an earlier one Schnittman produced showing a solitary black hole from various angles. Visualizations like this help scientists picture the fascinating consequences of extreme gravity’s funhouse mirror. For these masses, both accretion disks would actually emit most of their light in the UV, with the blue disk reaching a slightly higher temperature. Hotter gas gives off light closer to the blue end of the spectrum, and material orbiting smaller black holes experiences stronger gravitational effects that produce higher temperatures. The accretion disks have different colors, red and blue, to make it easier to track the light sources, but the choice also reflects reality. “These are the kinds of black hole binary systems where we think both members could maintain accretion disks lasting millions of years.” “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. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Zooming into each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly warped images of its partner. ![]() 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. In this visualization, disks of bright, hot, churning gas encircle both black holes, shown in red and blue to better track the light source. Explore how the extreme gravity of two orbiting supermassive black holes distorts our view. ![]()
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