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Simulation of what a massive black hole would look like
- egfx 7y agoInteresting. I’m amazed how the shape was declared by the notion you would never lose “sight” of the black hole no matter the direction you looked at it from. I just realized that was how the shape came to be.
- lisper 7y ago> you would never lose “sight” of the black hole You would never lose sight of the accretion disk. And you can see both sides simultaneously.
- etxm 7y agoThat’s beautiful.
- sudhirj 7y agoThere's a clearer explanation of why the disk looks that way and how the gravitational warp makes those light paths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
- kys228 7y agoHypothesis : the simulation is shit and they should go back to the workbench.
- ijidak 7y agoWell, I guess Nolan got it right. I seem to remember that being how the black hole was depicted in Interstellar
- tiborsaas 7y agoIt was Kip Thorne, but Nolan does get a credit for pushing actual science instead of the art department :) Actually the first black hole simulation was rendered way back in the 70s on pen and paper. https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean-pierre-luminet/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean-pi...
- RiceMunk 7y agoIf I remember correctly Nolan consulted with some actual astrophysicists to get it right. Furthermore, they managed to make use of the Hollywood-funded super computer time to get some actual science out of the deal. Here's a random article I googled discussing the topic: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/ https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...
- mr_mitm 7y agoNot just any astrophysicist. It was Kip Thorne, who was already an authority in general relativity even before he received the Nobel prize in 2017 for his work on gravitational waves. His works on the movie led to the publication of a scientific paper: https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.4916949 https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.4916949
- biddlesby 7y agoI was working at the visual effects studio responsible (Double Negative) at the time. I didn't work on that project but it was pretty cool work they were doing, and was in close collaboration with Kip.
- rezlhonep 7y agoThere was a cooler ESA simulation a few months back. I’ve struggled to try and find the video
- SiempreViernes 7y agoMaybe you think of this magnetohydrodynamic simulation: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1907o/ https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1907o/ The NASA video is a visualisation that "simulates" the optical distortion.
- nobrains 7y agoThere were 2 major events when this became to regular people who were interested in black holes. First was the Interstellar movie, and the second was the black hole picture by the Event Horizon telescope team. This independent simulation also comes to the same conclusion. In summary, the light from the side of the black hole facing away from us, is also curved back and thrown towards us, when looking at the black hole from the side.
- thwarted 7y agothe light from the side of the black hole facing away from us, is also curved back and thrown towards us, when looking at the black hole from the side What does it mean to look at a black hole "from the side"?
- caf 7y agoPerpendicular to its spin axis (black holes have angular momentum, which is a vector).
- mr_toad 7y agoDoes the ‘equator’ of a spinning black hole have any relationship or influence on the accretion disc? Or vice versa? Is the direction of spin of a black hole even knowable?
- caf 7y agoThe spinning black hole drags space around it, which certainly distorts the accretion disc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- taneq 7y agoIt doesn't really make sense to refer to the 'side' of a black hole itself, but I'd guess they mean 'close to the plane of its accretion disk'?
- djmips 7y agoBack in 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet created the first "image" calculated the using the IBM 7040 mainframe but drawn by hand plotting points on paper with black India ink. The pic is cool. https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean-pierre-luminet/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/19/black-hole-image-jean-pi...
- ejolto 7y agoThat is really cool. Do you know if the source code is available somewhere? Would be interesting to try running it on modern hardware.
- caf 7y agoJean-Pierre Luminet has a blog, you could ask him: https://blogs.futura-sciences.com/e-luminet/ https://blogs.futura-sciences.com/e-luminet/
- joshvm 7y agoIt looks straightforward. Skipping basically all the maths, it's equation 19 in the paper. Each contour is a line of constant z (flux), plotted in polar coords: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979A%26A....75..228L http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979A%26A....75..228L You plug in the viewing angle, black hole mass and some other constants which are defined in the paper (might need some fiddling to get them to look nice). Then I think the plotter is just some monte carlo sampling and then inverted.
- vms20591 7y agoThat's awesome, thanks for the link!
- jokoon 7y agoGDPR wall EDIT: works with outline.com
- bartread 7y ago> Back in 1979 The image is fantastic but one of the things that makes the story cooler, I think, is that even in 1979 the IBM 7040 was something of a relic. Although only introduced in 1963, it was superseded as early as 1964: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7040 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7040 Just goes to show that if old computer hardware is all you have access to you can still do useful and amazing things.
- Gormisdomai 7y agoAlso interesting in this image is that the left side of the disk around the black hole appears brighter than the right side, because the matter in the disk is spinning so fast that you get Doppler beaming near to the speed of light.
- GistNoesis 7y agoThe picture is beautiful but I feel that it doesn't convey the right mental model of the black hole. It would be a great picture to illustrate gravitational lensing, but it's a not so great one for conveying what a black hole is. From the picture it seems that particles are swirling around in multiple directions, whereas the mental picture you should get is : there is a standard accretion ring but with gravitational lensing visual filter turned on. A black Saturn with a Snapchat filter
- mcv 7y agoA black Saturn wouldn't do it justice. Saturn doesn't bend space as extremely as a block hole does, and it's that extreme bending of space that's the hard part to visualise about a black hole. It's trivial to imagine a black ball with a ring around it, but it's the bending of space and the subsequent bending of light that's the hard part.
- GistNoesis 7y agoYep bending of light and warping is hard to visualize. Thankfully we can play with our own black hole at home. I took my crystal ball cut some cardboard into a ring. If you look, you can see both side of the ring behind the black hole : https://gistnoesis.github.io/blackhole.jpg https://gistnoesis.github.io/blackhole.jpg You just need to imagine a little stronger warping.
- kys228 7y agoYou are still shadowbanning people for naughty words, HN?
- agumonkey 7y agoisn't the gravity bending effect used by astronomers to compute stuff hidden by planets too ?
- arianvanp 7y agoYes! E.g. you can use the sun as a lens during a solar eclipse. It was actually the experiment that proved Einstein's general relativity to be more than a theory, because during a solar eclipse we can see stars at the edge of the eclipse that are actually _behind_ the sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_May_29,_1919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_May_29,_1919
- BurnGpuBurn 7y agoThe astronomical news community would do the public a very big favor if they started stating clearly which pictures are taken by telescopes and which are cgi.
- ifdefdebug 7y agoYes, I have meat people who thought pictures of our galaxy were actually pictures of our galaxy. (edit: I mean, from outside)
- DavidHm 7y agoSee, I wasn't sure whether that's a typo or the way an AI would refer to us.
- EvanAnderson 7y agoThey're made out of meat: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- gus_massa 7y agoWhen I was young the Milky way "was" an spiral galaxy, now it "is" a barred spiral galaxy and the "photo" changed according. :)
- raattgift 7y agoThink of what it "was" when your grandparents were young! In the 1910s, the observables were extremely faint visible-light nebulae, with M13 (Hercules) closely comparable to M33 (Triangulum), although the spiral structure and larger solid angle of the latter was known since 1850: http://www.messier.seds.org/more/m033_rosse.html http://www.messier.seds.org/more/m033_rosse.html (This only about five years after the first known resolution of nebulae into elliptical, spiral, and irregular; at the time the linked sketch was drawn there were enough observations of spiral nebulae to decide that M33 must be one as well). Observations were consistent with an extragalactic but nearby star cluster. Better observations led to an evolution of what, retrospectively, M33 "was": from closely comparable with M13 to more than a hundred times further away (~ 6.8 vs ~ 850kpc), and tens of billions rather than hundreds of thousands of stars. Perhaps it's best to think of "was" and "is" in relation to human observations. (This also comes up whenever someone objects to talking in the present sense about today's observations of objects at kiloparsec distances, as in "Sag A* is noisy today" provoking "no, it was noisy 26 000 years ago!" -- and of course hypotheses about what exactly generates the Sag A* observables have not fossilized yet). There are still large uncertainties about the exact structure of our own galaxy, but the (cosmological) Copernican principle is alive and well in that area of galactic astronomy since galaxy zoos are full of various subtypes of dusty spirals.
- wallace_f 7y agoWould it be possible that a habitable planet be close enough to one to see this with ordinary telescopes?
- SiempreViernes 7y agoMight be, black holes come in a very large range of sizes so a configuration where you have a habitable planet very close to a large enough black hole isn't impossible.
- turk73 7y ago"isn't impossible" == "is possible" learn to write clearly!
- lisper 7y agoDistance is not typically the limiting factor. Earth is close enough to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way to be able to see it. The problem is it’s obscured by other stuff, mainly dust.
- mcv 7y agoAwesome, but also oddly familiar. Does this new simulation add anything to Kip Thorne's black hole simulation[0] as soon in Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar? [0] https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interstellarOpener_f.png https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ut_interste...
- SiempreViernes 7y agoNot really, they are both the same sort of pop-cultural prop. I think one does include a bit of the blue shifting effects of the disk, a prominent effect they left out of interstellar.
- gigatexal 7y agoClick-bait title, ugh. “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” - Neil DeGrasse-Tyson
- rsj_hn 7y agoLovely. Interestingly, this feature of black holes that they allow you to see what is on the "far side" of the black hole as a result of gravitational lensing was one of the heuristics used by Leonard Susskind to propose the holographic principle in his famous paper, "The World As A Hologram" https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089 https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089 Note especially Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4, used to justify that a two dimensional screen is enough to capture all the information. Obviously there is a lot more going on -- especially the black hole entropy formula which says that entropy growths with surface area not volume -- to motivate this idea, but I always thought those figures were particularly educational.
- kys229 7y agoThanks for shadowbanning me again for my valid opinions commies...
- smcameron 7y agoThere are some nice somewhat interactive black hole renderings on shadertoy... https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=black+hole https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=black+hole https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdjXDy https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdjXDy
- grawprog 7y agoThe simulation is pretty amazing, but the wording and headline of the article point to what I feel like in science, not just physics, ecology's pretty bad for it too, but the impression I always get from models and simulations is that when they don't match up with reality, somehow reality's wrong and not the model or simulation.
- tempguy9999 7y ago"Mind-bending black hole simulation appears to defy reality" "Appears to". Doesn't say it does. Doesn't suggest it does. I think you're being unfair. > when they don't match up with reality, somehow reality's wrong and not the model or simulation. Can you point to some examples? This is not something I've noticed myself.
- raven_and_wolf 7y agoNo, this would be the pop science writers looking for click bait. Literally no one I know talks like this and I'm a black hole astrophysicist who actually knows one of the people that made the image.
- sova 7y agoVeritasium made an excellent youtube video explaining how this effect works (before the image was released!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo
- bufo 7y agoHere's a real time raytracer I wrote with first person movement to move around the black hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqnRs_xTWQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqnRs_xTWQ&feature=youtu.be https://github.com/fernand/schwarzschild_raytracer https://github.com/fernand/schwarzschild_raytracer
- andywenkhh 7y agoThis reminds me of the black hole shown in Interstellar (movie). It's fantastic even though being in a shelf is kind of unbelievable ;-)