They thought Black Gap Occasion Horizons seemed unusual. Try Binary Black Gap Occasion Horizons

One of the strangest predictions of general relativity is that gravity can deflect the path of light. The effect was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919. While the sun’s bending effect is small, the deflection of light near a black hole can be significant. So important that you need a powerful supercomputer to calculate the behavior of light.

Recently, NASA’s Goddard Media Studios released some videos showing us what a binary black hole system could look like under gravitational lenses. The simulation tracks the light paths that come from the accretion disks of two closely encircling black holes. One with a mass of 200 million suns, the other with half that mass. The simulation was run on the Discover supercomputer at NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation and lasted about a day.

Check out NASA Goddard’s video for the latest simulation.

This new simulation takes into account some of the more subtle effects. For example, near a rotating black hole, the light coming from the side rotating towards us appears brighter, while the light from the side rotating away from us appears weaker. This effect is known as Doppler boosting. Another strange effect is relativistic aberration, where black holes appear smaller as they approach the viewer and larger as they move away.

Each accretion disk reflects the other. Photo credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

Perhaps the greatest computational challenge is that you cannot just do a simple first-order simulation of the lens. When two black holes are visually close together, the light from black hole A can be distorted by black hole B to the point where it is rotated back to black hole A’s path. Light paths can sometimes be so distorted that it is difficult to determine which accretion disk the light came from. To make this effect more visible, the visualization uses a light red color for the accretion disk of the larger black hole and a light blue color for that of the smaller black hole. In the videos and pictures you can see reflections of one accretion disk for black holes in the other. The proximity of the black holes also distorts the visual shape of the accretion disks, making them appear more oval than they actually are.

While this is not a simulation of an actual black hole system, it says a lot about how binary black holes can appear. This is especially important as we are discovering more binary black holes through their gravitational waves. Although black holes do not emit light even when they merge, their accretion disks do. If we better understand how this light is distorted by gravity, we can better combine optical and gravitational data to get a detailed understanding of real black hole fusions.

Reference: GMS N. GMS. “The NASA visualization examines the doubly distorted world of the binary black holes.” https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13831. Published on April 15, 2021.

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