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The black hole, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar, shows an event horizon fairly accurately for a very specific class of rotating black holes. In the innermost regions, particles occasionally fall in, adding to the mass of the black hole, while the material in front of the black hole will obscure part of the sphere/circle you’d otherwise see.īut the event horizon itself isn’t transparent, and you shouldn’t be able to see the matter behind it. Due to the conservation of angular momentum, and of collisions between the various infalling particles, a disk-like object will emerge around the black hole, which will heat up and emit radiation. Asteroids, gas clouds, or even entire stars will be torn apart by the tidal forces coming from an object as massive as a black hole. Image credit: Mark A. Garlick.īecause of their tremendous gravitational effects, black holes will form accretion disks in the presence of other sources of matter. An illustration of an active black hole, one that accretes matter and accelerates a portion of it outwards in two perpendicular jets, may describe the black hole at the center of our galaxy in many regards. Some illustrations, though, do successfully add these in. Unfortunately, these illustrations are flawed, too: they fail to account for foreground material and for accretion around the black hole. This is a more detailed and accurate illustration of what a black hole looks like, as it also possesses an apparent event horizon sized appropriately with the curvature of space in General Relativity. Because of their gravity, black holes will magnify and distort any background light, due to the effect of gravitational lensing. Image credit: Ute Kraus, Physics education group Kraus / Axel Mellinger.īut there’s more to the story than that. A black hole isn’t just a mass superimposed over an isolated background, but will exhibit gravitational effects that stretch, magnify and distort background light due to gravitational lensing. From this spherical region of space, no light can escape, and so it should appear as a black circle, from any perspective, superimposed on the background of the Universe.
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This makes sense if you think about what a black hole actually is: a collection of mass that’s so great and so compact that the escape velocity from its surface is greater than the speed of light! Since nothing can move that quickly, not even the forces or interactions between the particles inside the black hole, the inside of a black hole collapses to a singularity, and an event horizon is created around the black hole. The oldest type of illustration is simply a circular, black disk, blocking out all the background light from behind it. But which ones, if any, are correct? Artwork illustrating a simple black circle, perhaps with a ring around it, is an oversimplified picture of what an event horizon looks like. There are a few different classes of illustrations floating around, to be sure. How is it that the event horizon does not completely surround the black hole? Shouldn’t the event horizon completely surround the black hole like an egg shell? All the artist renderings of a black hole are like slicing a hard boiled egg in half and showing that image. So what will it looks like? That’s the question of Dan Barrett, who’s seen some illustrations and is a bit puzzled: While it will take months to combine and analyze the data from all the different telescopes, we should get our first image of an event horizon by the end of 2017. It’s so large that telescopes positioned at different locations on Earth should be able to directly image it, if they all viewed it simultaneously. From our point of view, its event horizon is the largest of all black holes. Of all the black holes that are known in the Universe, the one at our galactic center - Sagittarius A* - is special. “It is conceptually interesting, if not astrophysically very important, to calculate the precise apparent shape of the black hole… Unfortunately, there seems to be no hope of observing this effect.” –Jim BardeenĮarlier this month, telescopes from all around the world took data, simultaneously, of the Milky Way’s central black hole. You might think that it should be all black, but then how would we see it? Despite how dark it is, all black holes are thought to have formed from normal matter alone, but illustrations like these are only partially accurate.