APOD: Spiraling Supermassive Black Holes (2018 Dec 03)

[APOD Robot]

Spiraling Supermassive Black Holes

Explanation: 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.

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[ro_star]

there appears to be something that looks like a third black hole or sphere in the center between the two black holes, and it is of the same size; wonder if that is an artifact, or part of the simulation result

[De58te]

Physics is amazing. It is amazing how a sophisticated computer animation of the event on a grand universe scale can look just the same on a small scale. I get the same swirling pattern when I put two electrical mixers in a bowl of batter with food coloring thrown in.

[Boomer12k]

Interesting....

:---[===] *

[Markus Schwarz]

there appears to be something that looks like a third black hole or sphere in the center between the two black holes, and it is of the same size; wonder if that is an artifact, or part of the simulation result

At 30s, the video displays a text that 'this region is not modeled in current simulation'. Hence, it is an artifact of the current simulation.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<"In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Norwegian: I Dovregubbens hall) is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play Peer Gynt. The English translation of the name is not literal. Dovre is a mountainous region in Norway, and "gubbe" translates into (old) man or husband. "Gubbe" is used along with its female counterpart "kjerring" to differentiate male and female trolls, "trollgubbe" and "trollkjerring". In the play, Dovregubben is a troll king that Peer Gynt invents in a fantasy.

Grieg himself wrote "For the Hall of the Mountain King I have written something that so reeks of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism, and 'to-thyself-be-enough-ness' that I can't bear to hear it, though I hope that the irony will make itself felt.">>