We are nearing the end of Black Hole Week, NASA’s celebration of the beastly space monsters that suck in light, matter, and anything else that gets too close to them. But eating light does not mean that black holes are impossible to imagine. As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shared a selection of some of the best visuals of black holes so you can get an idea of what these mind-boggling phenomena are.
The images, which are also available as wallpapers for desktops and mobile devices if you want to decorate your devices with black hole images, show simulations and visualizations designed to try to imagine the strange effects of extreme gravitational forces around Black hole. These include a simulation of a binary system consisting of two interacting black holes:
These two black holes are only 40 orbits from the fusion in this simulation of the light that the environment emits while dancing. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Preview of such a binary black hole:
This image shows the distorted appearance of a larger supermassive black hole (red) when it passes almost directly behind another black hole (blue) with half its mass. The gravity of the black hole in the foreground turns your partner into a surreal collection of rainbows. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell
An illustration of a disk of matter that revolves around a black hole called an accretion disk that will eventually be sucked into a black hole once it crosses the event horizon, and an incredibly hot region called a corona that sends X-rays. in space:
A black hole pulls material from a neighboring star into an accretion disk in this illustration of a black hole called MAXI J1820 + 070. Above the disk is an area of superheated subatomic particles called the corona. Aurore Simonet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Composite image showing the bustling center of our galaxy, where objects dance around the supermassive black hole in the heart of the Milky Way:
The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, gas clouds with temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and white dwarf stars tearing material from accompanying stars. and beautiful threads of radio broadcasting. This new composite image shows Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. X-ray: NASA / CXC / UMass / D. Wang et al .; Radio: NRF / SARAO / MeerKAT
And an image of visible light made by Hubble, showing the huge energy jets emitted by the supermassive black hole in a galaxy called Hercules A:
Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the nucleus of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A, as depicted by the Hubble Space Telescope’s wide-field camera 3 and the Carl G. Jansky (VLA) NW Massive Telescope in the NLA. NASA, ESA, S. Baum and K. O’Dee (RIT), R. Pearly and W. Cotton (NRAO / AUI / NSF) and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)
Black holes have long been thought to be inaccessible due to their light-absorbing properties. But the Event Horizon Telescope project went down in history in 2019, when it shot the first image of its kind in a black hole. They managed to use radio telescopes from around the world to work together to capture signals from the very horizon of events, the border around the black hole from which nothing can escape. They depicted an absolutely huge black hole in the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light-years away.
Now the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team is preparing for another big announcement. According to the European Southern Observatory, the EHT team will present “revolutionary” results regarding the Milky Way find this week, May 12. So stay tuned for the black hole this week, as there may be a picture of the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A *, along the way.
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