00:03The light-bending gravity of a black hole needs no introduction, but have you ever wondered what would happen if
00:10two black holes got thrown together?
00:13NASA has released a visualization of two supermassive black holes locked in a binary orbit.
00:19The simulation, made by astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman of NASA's Guttered Space Flight Center, shows how each black hole, millions of
00:29times bigger than the sun, distorts light emitting from the other's accretion disk, the hot gas surrounding it.
00:36The colors aren't just for show. The gas around smaller black holes would most likely be hotter and emit light
00:43near the blue end of the spectrum.
00:45The extreme gravity distorts the light coming from different parts of the disks, resulting in a warped image.
00:53According to Schnittman, zooming into each black hole reveals multiple increasingly distorted images of its partner.
01:01Schnittman used NASA's Discover supercomputer to make the simulation, since the calculations needed would have taken a modern desktop computer
01:10about 10 years.
