NASA has released a stunning new high-resolution visualization of a black hole, specifically how its gravity distorts the way it looks. NASA describes this warping effect as similar to what one would see when looking in a carnival mirror, skewing light, twisting the appearance of surrounding material, and forming what appears to be light and dark ‘lanes’ in the accretion disk.
Created by Jeremy Schnittman using a custom software at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the visualisation demonstrates how the galactic gravity sinks influence the spacetime surrounding them.
NASA took to Twitter to post about the same, writing that that gravity of the black hole is no “intense” that it “distorts its surroundings like a carnival mirror.”
Visualize a mind-bending black hole 😱
The gravity of a black hole is so intense, it distorts its surroundings like a carnival mirror. Simulations help us see what Einstein meant when he said gravity warps the fabric of space & time. Get sucked in: https://t.co/9TK79WZ6Fr pic.twitter.com/B6k7cHjpA6
— NASA (@NASA) September 26, 2019
The visualisation can be seen depicting the dense space-time distorting body in a spectacular manner.
The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape it, with the gravitational pull attracting all matter in its range, forming a disk of gas, dust and other matter.
According to NASA, the new visualisation of the black hole illustrates how gravity distorts view.
According to a report in Cnet, NASA’s visualisation shows the disk edge-on, thus the light that can be seen at the top of the image is actually from behind the black hole. One can see the left-hand side brighter than the right because it’s moving toward the viewer. This is because of a cosmic phenomenon called Doppler beaming which is in accordance with special relativity matter moving at the speed of light that has varying apparent luminosity.
According to NASA, Jeremy Schnittman, who generated the images said, “Simulations and movies like these really help us visualize what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time.” He added that the visualizations were limited to the imagination and computer programill recent times, adding, “I never thought that it would be possible to see a real black hole.”
