Explanation:
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 been 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.
