Astrophysicists have unveiled terrifyingly beautiful computer simulations that finally reveal how black holes, those cosmic monsters, naturally generate the dazzling light displays detected from billions of light-years across the universe.
The Dazzling Colours of Destruction
In the stunning new imagery, the black holes themselves sit at the centre as a dark, empty void, reflecting no light. However, blossoming around these destructive forces are vibrant, richly-textured patterns of purple, pink, and orange. These incredible cosmic light shows are produced by material—such as gas, dust, and matter—emitting vast amounts of energy as it spirals inexorably into the black hole's grasp.
Experts from the Simons Foundation in New York managed to observe these unforgiving regions of space by feeding light spectrum data into some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Study author Lizhong Zhang explained to the Daily Mail, "The colour represents how dense the gas is. The brighter the colour, the more dense the gas around the black hole."
Modelling Stellar Black Holes with Exascale Power
While high-resolution images of supermassive black holes have been captured before, the smaller stellar black holes have remained elusive, appearing only as pinpoints of light. To model the accretion process around these stellar black holes—which form from the collapse of massive stars—the research team turned to immense computational power.
They utilised two of the planet's most powerful supercomputers: Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. These "exascale" machines are capable of performing a quintillion operations per second. Even with this power, the team needed complex mathematics and algorithms optimised for exascale computing to achieve accurate results.
Their simulations, published in The Astrophysical Journal, mark the first time physical processes in stellar black hole accretion have been calculated and presented accurately, moving beyond previous shortcuts that simplified radiation calculations.
A Stable Disk in a Chaotic Storm
The findings show how matter behaves as it spirals toward stellar-mass black holes. The material forms a "highly turbulent" radiation-dominated disk, launching chaotic winds and sometimes powerful jets. Remarkably, near the black hole itself, this dense but thin accretion disk "remains remarkably stable" despite the turbulent flow feeding it. The disk is embedded within a magnetically dominated envelope that helps stabilise the entire system.
Due to their immense gravitational pull, black holes draw material into a swirling, bright orange disc known as an accretion disk. This scorching hot disk is the black hole's primary light source, enabling astronomers to detect these phenomena in galaxies billions of light-years away.
The team now aims to determine if their computational method applies to all black hole types, including the supermassive giants at the centre of galaxies like our own Milky Way's Sagittarius A*. Looking ahead, scientists report a 90 per cent chance of witnessing a black hole explosion within the next decade, an event telescopes on Earth and in space hope to capture.
What happens if you fall into a black hole? The process, grimly nicknamed 'spaghettification', would see the incredible gravitational gradient stretch a human body into a long, thin line. Simultaneously, intense radiation from the accretion disk would blast the individual with powerful X-rays. Time dilation effects would mean the person's experience of time would slow to a crawl relative to outside observers, before they ultimately crossed the event horizon—the point of no return.
