Simulations Gallery

This animation shows how an orbiting hot-spot, or region of high temperature, in the accretion flow around a black hole would appear at different inclinations of the orbit. The upper right panel shows the hot spot with no gravitational lensing effects. The main left panel shows the hot-spot with lensing, starting with the orbit face-on and then increasing in inclination until the orbit is edge on to our line of sight. You can see secondary and tertiary images formed by the black hole's gravity. On the lower right, the linearly polarized emission and the total emission are shown as a function of orbital phase.

Credit: Avery Broderick and Avi Loeb

Equatorial slice of a black hole accretion disk model in a General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulation. The pseudocolor shows the density field. See the scale below the simulation to find the density each color correlates to.

Credit: Hotaka Shiokawa

This video shows a snapshot of a black hole simulation in different wavelength/frequency. It demonstrates that the accretion disk becomes more transparent when we increase the frequency/decrease the wavelength. At around 1 mm wavelength, the accretion disk becomes completely transparent and we can see the black hole silhouette. In addition, the blurring effects due to interstellar scattering are weaker at shorter wavelength. Taking both of these into account, wavelengths around 1mm are optimal for SgrA* EHT observations. 

Credit: Chi-Kwan Chan

General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulation of a black hole accretion disk. The gas is orbiting around the central  black hole and slowly moving toward it. The disk is highly turbulent and seeded with the entangled magnetic field lines, shown by the white lines. The jet structure is highlighted with the white contour surface. The disk is tenuous and would not be very luminous in the sky, which is a good model for Sgr A*, one of the main targets of the EHT. This simulation was run for few weeks on a supercomputer using several hundreds of CPUs. 

Credit: Hotaka Shiokawa

Observational appearance of an accretion disk in a General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulation at a radio wavelength. The light rays emitted from inner part of the disk are vent before the arrival to the "telescope" due to the gravitational lensing effect and produce the distorted images. The disk is viewed from 45 degrees above the equatorial plane of the disk. Left side of the image is brighter than the right side due to the Doppler beaming effect: light emitted from a substance moving toward an observer is brighter than that of moving away from the observer. The central black part is the "shadow" of the black hole, which is what EHT is trying to see. 

Credit: Hotaka Shiokawa

High resolution snapshot of the above video.

Credit: Hotaka Shiokawa

Still image from the video directly above.

Credit: Hotaka Shiokawa

Simulation of hot gas falling into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The wavelength of the light for these three movies is approximately 1mm. These videos each show different assumptions about the spin of the black hole, the geometry of the magnetic field around the black hole, and various parameters related to plasma physics. 

Credit: Lia Medeiros, Chi-Kwan Chan, Feryal Özel, Dimitrios Psaltis

This image highlights the different features of the accretion flow around Sgr A* by combining monochromatic images at different wavelengths/frequencies. The red color channel is computed at 1cm wavelength, which shows the very bright funnel regions along the spin axis of the black hole. However, the accretion disk is opaque at this wavelength, which hides the black hole shadow. The green color channel is for 1mm wavelength, where the accretion disk becomes transparent and the black hole shadow is visible. This is in fact the wavelength where the EHT will image Sgr A*. The blue color channel shows the diffusive x-ray emission from the accretion disk. Note that the X-ray emission is very weak compare to the radio emission, and is enhanced in this image to show the body of the accretion disk.

Credit: Chi-Kwan Chan