Trous Noirs massifs en spirale
Video Credit:
NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center;
Music:
In the Hall of the Mountain King by
Edvard Grieg
Do black holes glow when they collide?
When merging, co-orbiting
black holes are sure to emit a burst of unusual
gravitational radiation, but will they emit
light, well before that,
if they are
surrounded by gas?
To help find out,
astrophysicists created a
sophisticated computer simulation.
The simulation and featured
resulting video accurately depicts two spiraling
supermassive black holes, including the effects of
Einstein's general relativity on the surrounding gas and light.
The video
first shows the system from the top, and later from the side where unusual
gravitational lens distortions are more prominent.
Numerical results indicate that gravitational and magnetic forces should energize the gas to emit high-energy light from the
ultraviolet
to the X-ray.
The emission of such light may enable humanity to
detect and study supermassive
black hole pairs well before they spiral together.