The immense gravity of each black hole distorts light from the other’s accretion disk, creating a “funhouse mirror” effect.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:03 The light bending gravity of a black hole needs no introduction, but
00:08 have you ever wondered what would happen if two black holes got thrown together?
00:13 NASA has released a visualization of two supermassive black holes
00:17 locked in a binary orbit.
00:20 The simulation made by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA's
00:24 Guttered Space Flight Center shows how each black hole,
00:28 millions of times bigger than the sun, distorts light emitting from the other's
00:33 accretion disk, the hot gas surrounding it.
00:36 The colors aren't just for show.
00:38 The gas around smaller black holes would most likely be hotter and
00:42 emit light near the blue end of the spectrum.
00:46 The extreme gravity distorts the light coming from different parts of the disks,
00:50 resulting in a warped image.
00:53 According to Schnittman,
00:54 zooming into each black hole reveals multiple increasingly distorted images
01:00 of its partner.
01:01 Schnittman used NASA's Discover supercomputer to make the simulation,
01:05 since the calculations needed would have taken a modern desktop computer
01:10 about ten years.
01:11 [MUSIC]