Explanation:
If one black hole looks strange, what about two?
Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting
supermassive black holes make their way through the warped
space-time produced by extreme gravity in
this
detailed computer visualization.
The simulated accretion disks
have been given different false color schemes,
red for the disk surrounding a 200-million-solar-mass black hole,
and blue for the disk surrounding a 100-million-solar-mass
black hole.
For these masses, though, both
accretion disks would
actually emit most of their light in the
ultraviolet.
The video
allows us to see
both sides of each black hole at the same time.
Red and blue light originating from both
black holes can be seen in the innermost ring of light, called the
photon sphere, near their event horizons.
In the past decade,
gravitational waves from black hole collisions have actually
been detected, although the
coalescence of
supermassive black holes remains undiscovered.
