Simulation Of Two Merging Black Holes In Front Of Milky Way Andy Bohn, François Hébert, William Throwe, Darius Bunandar, Katherine Henriksson, Mark A. Scheel, and Nicholas W. Taylor Spacetime Distortions Simulated In Front Of A Colorful Grid The researchers also simulated spacetime distortions in front of a simpler background in order to clearly illustrate the effect. Click here to enlarge. Andy Bohn et al. Black holes arent just ultra-massive collapsed stars that trap light with the sheer force of their gravitational waves. Theyre also very difficult objects to model--especially when they interact with other black holes. This image from a recent study represents a good first impression of what two black holes might look like as they come close to slamming into one another. There are only two bodies pictured, but their mass bends the starlight around them in strange ways, creating the impression of several orbs. In the world of asteroids, comets, and planets, collisions follow fairly classical physics models--the set of rules Isaac Newton pioneered for describing the way things speed up, slow down, tug on each other, and otherwise behave in this universe. This system remains pretty accurate for modeling, say, a lander approaching a comet, or an asteroid slamming into Earth. But Einstein showed that Newtownian physics is at best a rough approximation of the universes ultra large-scale mechanics. Black holes warp spacetime, sending ripples through the universal fabric. When two get close, they lurch toward one another at substantial fractions of lightspeed, ripping spacetime to tatters in the process. The effect looks a bit like what youd see if you bounced a starscape off a wobbling fun house mirror. Whenever scientists tried to model it, physicist Matthew Duez tells Popular Science, their equations blew up in their faces. Duez, a researcher with the Simulating Extreme Spacetimes (SXS) project, says that for decades, scientists best understandings of the universe just werent cutting it when it came to modelling black hole mergers. They needed to evolve Einsteins field equations governing spacetime distortions. The models gradually got better over time, until the SXS team was able to simulate what a double black hole impact might look like to the naked eye. They placed two imaginary black holes in front of the Milky Way in their simulation. Then they tracked each ray of light as it moved through the system to produce step-by-step images of the process. If you watch the animation below, you can see points of light appearing, disappearing, and seeming to shift around. In fact, the stars are staying still--but the light streaming from them twists, splits, and spins around the black hole. The resulting circular clusters are known as Einstein Rings. Popular Science Big Pic: Simulated Black Hole Collision Shreds The Milky Way [ANIMATED] Popular Science
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:56:13 +0000