Celebrating Black hole week, NASA took to its official Instagram handle to share a stunning video of the same and it comes with an advisory- don’t stare too long or you might get “pulled in"! Black holes are born after the death of massive stars. This visualisation by NASA simulates the appearance of a black hole as seen on its edge. The inbound matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. “The black hole’s extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, making rings of matter visible above and below. At the center lies the black hole’s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon — its point of no return," read the caption.
This video was first shared in September 2019 after scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope released the first actual image of a black hole and its shadow. Since being uploaded, it has managed to gather a total of 3,942,491 views. Stunned by the video, netizens took to the comment section. One person wrote, “Bruh i watched it for too long and got pulled in now I’m in another universe where hitler is a good guy and Gandhi tried to nuke the whole planet." Another person wrote, “I’m ready to get pulled in send me to a different reality."
NASA also shared another visualisation on YouTube which is a compilation of 22 X-ray binary systems. The caption states that the view of each system reflects how we see it from Earth. “Star colors ranging from blue-white to reddish represent temperatures from 5 times hotter to 45% cooler than our Sun. In most of these systems, a stream of matter from the star forms an accretion disk around the black hole," read the caption. Have a look:
Meanwhile, earlier, the McDonald Observatory at The University of Texas, Austin detected an unusually big black hole at the centre of one of the Milky Way’s dwarf satellite galaxies. The newly discovered black hole – named Leo I – is around the same size as the Milky Way’s suspected black hole. The galaxy’s mass is approximately 20 million times that of the Sun. The black hole has a mass of roughly 3.3 million solar masses, or around 16% of the galaxy’s total mass. In a statement, UT astronomer Karl Gebhardt, co-author of the paper, was quoted as saying by SciTechDaily, “You have a very small galaxy that is falling into the Milky Way, and its black hole is about as massive as the Milky Way’s.” Gebhardt added, “The mass ratio is absolutely huge. The Milky Way is dominant; the Leo I black hole is almost comparable.”
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