The new visualization of a black hole by NASA is so beautiful that we could cry about it

The very first direct image of the events horizon of a black hole was a truly awesome scientific ingenuity feat. But it was extremely difficult to obtain and the resulting image was relatively low resolution.

The techniques and technology will be refined and it is expected that future direct images of black holes will improve over time. And a new NASA visualization – performed for the agency's Black Hole Week – shows what we could expect to see in high-resolution images of a black hole supra massive which accumulates actively.

Supermassive black holes are located in the center of most major galaxies, and the way they arrived is a mystery. What came first, the black hole or the galaxy, is one of the big questions of cosmology.

What we do know is that they are really huge, like millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun; that they can control the formation of stars; that when they wake up and start feeding, they can become the brightest objects in the universe. Over the decades, we have also discovered some of their strange dynamics.

First direct image of a black hole, M87 *. (EHT Collaboration)

In fact, the very first simulated image of a black hole, calculated using an IBM 7040 computer with punch cards from the 1960s and hand-drawn by the French astrophysicist Jean -Pierre Luminet in 1978, still very much like the simulation of NASA.

In both simulations (the above news and Luminet's work below), you see a black circle in the center. It's the event horizon, the point where electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves, X-rays, etc.) is no longer fast enough to reach the speed of escape due to the fact gravitational attraction of the black hole.

(Jean-Pierre Luminet)

In the middle of the black hole is the front of the disc of material that swirls around the black hole, such as water in a drain. It generates such intense radiation by friction that we can detect this part with our telescopes – that's what you see on the M87 * image.

You can see the ring of photons, a ring of perfect light around the event horizon. And you can see a wide ray of light around the black hole. This light actually comes from the part of the accretion disk behind the black hole; but the gravity is so intense, even outside the horizon of events, that it distorts the space-time and curves the path of light around the black hole.

You can also see that one side of the accretion disk is brighter than the other. This effect is called relativistic beam and is caused by the rotation of the disc. The part of the disc moving towards us is brighter because it moves almost at the speed of light. This movement produces a change of frequency in the wavelength of light. This is what is known as the Doppler effect.

The side that moves away from us is therefore weaker, because this movement has the opposite effect.

"It is precisely this strong asymmetry of apparent luminosity," wrote Luminet in an article last year, "which is the main signature of a black hole, the only celestial object capable of giving a rotation speed to the internal regions of an accretion disk at the speed of light and to induce a very strong Doppler effect. "

Such simulations can help us understand the extreme physics surrounding supermassive black holes – and it helps us understand what we see when we look at the M87 * photo.