August 20, 2019
The universe has spent billions of years making things that shine. On your birthday, we celebrate one of its quieter masterpieces.
Animation: Spiral Disk around a Black Hole
Birthday · August 20, 2019
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APOD published August 20, 2019 · Video still. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What would it look like to orbit a black hole? Many black holes are surrounded by swirling pools of gas known as accretion disks. These disks can be extremely hot, and much of the orbiting gas will eventually fall through the black hole's event horizon -- where it will never be seen again. The featured animation is an artist's rendering of the curious disk spiraling around the supermassive black hole at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 3147. Gas at the inner edge of this disk is so close to the black hole that it moves unusually fast -- at 10 percent of the speed of light. Gas this fast shows relativistic beaming, making the side of the disk heading toward us appear significantly brighter than the side moving away. The animation is based on images of NGC 3147 made recently with the Hubble Space Telescope. Astrophysicists: Browse 2,000+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library