Rare Black Hole Event Seen by Satellites and Ground-based Telescopes Live Shots

This movie shows a complete revolution around a simulated black hole and its accretion disk following a path that is perpendicular to the disk. The black hole’s extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light coming from different parts of the disk, but exactly what we see depends on our viewing angle. The greatest distortion occurs when viewing the system nearly edgewise. As our viewpoint rotates around the black hole, we see different parts of the fast-moving gas in the accretion disk moving directly toward us. Due to a phenomenon called "relativistic Doppler beaming," gas in the disk that's moving toward us makes that side of the disk appear brighter, the opposite side darker. This effect disappears when we're directly above or below the disk because, from that angle, none of the gas is moving directly toward us.When our viewpoint passes beneath the disk, it looks like the gas is moving in the opposite direction. This is no different that viewing a clock from behind, which would make it look like the hands are moving counter-clockwise.CORRECTION: In earlier versions of the 360-degree movies on this page, these important effects were not apparent. This was due to a minor mistake in orienting the camera relative to the disk. The fact that it was not initially discovered by the NASA scientist who made the movie reflects just how bizarre and counter-intuitive black holes can be! Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman This movie shows the black hole visualization using a partial rotation, plus a long sequence where the black hole is viewed nearly edge on.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman This image highlights and explains various aspects of the black hole visualization. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman This illustration shows how direct and bent light rays from a black hole's accretion disk produce the apparent image and motion seen by an observer. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman GIF and MPEG-4 version with continuous full rotation.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman GIF and MPEG-4 loop of edge-on view. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman GIF with 360-degree rotation and a pause when the view is almost edge on; uses a square frame to show the complete accretion disk.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman 16x9 GIF zoomed into the central region, highlighting the photon ring, with 360-degree rotation and a pause at almost edge on. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Square GIF zoomed into the central region, highlighting the photon ring, with 360-degree rotation and a pause at almost edge on. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman 16x9 GIF with 360-degree rotation and a pause when the view is almost edge on.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Banner style looping GIF showing continuous 360-degree rotation. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Banner style looping GIF showing 360-degree rotation and a pause at nearly edge on.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman Banner style looping GIF showing edge-on view.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman 16x9 looping GIF showing edge-on view.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman 4K version of the visualization with 360-degree rotation and a pause when the view is almost edge on.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole’s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance. Bright knots constantly form and dissipate in the disk as magnetic fields wind and twist through the churning gas. Nearest the black hole, the gas orbits at close to the speed of light, while the outer portions spin a bit more slowly. This difference stretches and shears the bright knots, producing light and dark lanes in the disk. Viewed from the side, the disk looks brighter on the left than it does on the right. Glowing gas on the left side of the disk moves toward us so fast that the effects of Einstein’s relativity give it a boost in brightness; the opposite happens on the right side, where gas moving away us becomes slightly dimmer. This asymmetry disappears when we see the disk exactly face on because, from that perspective, none of the material is moving along our line of sight.Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole. This so-called “photon ring” is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. Because the black hole modeled in this visualization is spherical and non-rotating, the photon ring looks nearly circular and identical from any viewing angle. Inside the photon ring is the black hole’s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon — its point of no return. This visualization is “mass invariant,” which means it can represent a black hole of any mass. The size of the black hole's shadow is proportional to its mass, but so is the size of the accreetion disk, so its properties scale accordingly.Simulations and movies like these really help us visualize what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time. For More InformationSee [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-visualization-shows-a-black-hole-s-warped-world](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-visualization-shows-a-black-hole-s-warped-world) Related pages

This movie is available both with and without on-screen text.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Tension Underlying" from Universal Production Music This movie zooms into galaxy M87 using real visible light, X-ray and radio pictures of the galaxy, its jet of high-speed particles, and the shadow of its central black hole. Related pages

Here are highlights from TESS's first year of science operations. All exoplanet animations are illustrations.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Elapsing Time" from Killer TracksWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. Here are highlights from TESS's first year of science operations in a shorter, one-minute video. All exoplanet animations are illustrations.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Elapsing Time" from Killer TracksComplete transcript available. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered 21 planets outside our solar system and captured data on other interesting events occurring in the southern sky during its first year of science. TESS has now turned its attention to the northern hemisphere to complete the most comprehensive planet-hunting expedition ever undertaken.TESS began hunting for exoplanets (or worlds orbiting distant stars) in the southern sky in July of 2018, while also collecting data on supernovae, black holes and other phenomena in its line of sight. Along with the planets TESS has discovered, the mission has identified over 800 candidate exoplanets that are waiting for confirmation by ground-based telescopes.To search for exoplanets, TESS uses four large cameras to watch a 24-by-96-degree section of the sky for 27 days at a time. Some of these sections overlap, so some parts of the sky are observed for almost a year. TESS is concentrating on stars closer than 300 light-years from our solar system, watching for transits, which are periodic dips in brightness caused by an object, like a planet, passing in front of the star. On July 18, the southern portion of the survey was completed and the spacecraft turned its cameras to the north. When it completes the northern section in 2020, TESS will have mapped over three quarters of the sky.Here are a few of the interesting objects and events TESS saw during its first year. For More InformationSee [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-tess-mission-completes-first-year-of-survey-turns-to-northern-sky](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-tess-mission-completes-first-year-of-survey-turns-to-northern-sky) Related pages

Watch what scientists think happens when a black hole tears apart a hot, dense white dwarf star. A team working with observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory suggest this process explains a mysterious outburst known as AT2018cow. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Curious Events" from Killer TracksWatch this video on the JPL YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. Labeled animation only, no intro text, audio, or end credits. Optimized for presentations.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center An unlabeled, no-pause version of the above animation.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory hosts three instruments that allow the satellite to observe ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and gamma-ray light. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center AT2018cow erupted near a galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, which is located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. The yellow cross shows the location of this puzzling outburst.Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey Same as above, no labels. A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event, called AT2018cow and nicknamed “the Cow” after the coincidental last letters of its official designation, is unlike any celestial outburst ever seen before, prompting multiple theories about its source. Over three days, the Cow produced a sudden explosion of light at least 10 times brighter than a typical supernova, and then it faded over the next few months. This unusual event occurred near a star-forming galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Using data from multiple NASA missions, including the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA’s (the European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL missions, two groups have provided possible explanations for the Cow’s origins. One group argues that the Cow is a monster black hole shredding a passing star. The second group hypothesizes that it is a supernova — a stellar explosion — that gave birth to a black hole or a neutron star. Whatever its source, the Cow represents a stellar death scenario not previously seen. For More InformationSee [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7314](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7314) Related pages

Animation showing the TESS spacecraft and the coverage of its four cameras. Each camera covers a 24 degrees-square patch of sky and the four cameras are arranged in a vertical strip called an observation sector. Same as the above, but without onscreen text. Animation showing how TESS will observe the sky. TESS will watch each observation sector for at least 27 days, before rotating to the next one, covering first the south and then the north to build a map of 85 percent of the sky. Same as the above, but with no onscreen text. Related pages

Beauty Pass of TESS spacecraft Second Beauty Pass of TESS spacecraft Loopable animation of TESS spacecraft.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will discover thousands of exoplanets in orbit around the brightest stars in the sky. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. No ground-based survey can achieve this feat. Related pages

This animation illustrates how debris from a tidally disrupted star collides with itself, creating shock waves that emit ultraviolet and optical light far from the black hole. According to Swift observations of ASASSN-14li, these clumps took about a month to fall back to the black hole, where they produced changes in the X-ray emission that correlated with the earlier UV and optical changes.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterWatch this video on the NASA.gov Video YouTube channel. 4K UHD version. This animation illustrates how debris from a tidally disrupted star collides with itself, creating shock waves that emit ultraviolet and optical light far from the black hole. According to Swift observations of ASASSN-14li, these clumps took about a month to fall back to the black hole, where they produced changes in the X-ray emission that correlated with the earlier UV and optical changes. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center This artist’s rendering shows the tidal disruption event named ASASSN-14li, where a star wandering too close to a 3-million-solar-mass black hole was torn apart. The debris gathered into an accretion disk around the black hole. New data from NASA's Swift satellite show that the initial formation of the disk was shaped by interactions among incoming and outgoing streams of tidal debris.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Some 290 million years ago, a star much like the sun wandered too close to the central black hole of its galaxy. Intense tides tore the star apart, which produced an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that first reached Earth in 2014. Now, a team of scientists using observations from NASA's Swift satellite have mapped out how and where these different wavelengths were produced in the event, named ASASSN-14li, as the shattered star's debris circled the black hole.Astronomers discovered brightness changes in X-rays that occurred about a month after similar changes were observed in visible and UV light, which means the optical and UV emission arose far from the black hole, likely where elliptical streams of orbiting matter crashed into each other. ASASSN-14li was discovered Nov. 22, 2014, in images obtained by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASASSN), which includes robotic telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Follow-up observations with Swift's X-ray and Ultraviolet/Optical telescopes began eight days later and continued every few days for the next nine months. ASASSN-14li was produced when a sun-like star wandered too close to a 3-million-solar-mass black hole. A star grazing a black hole with 10,000 or more times the sun's mass experiences enormous tides that tear it into a stream of debris. Astronomers call this a tidal disruption event. Matter falling toward a black hole collects into a spinning accretion disk, where it becomes compressed and heated before eventually spilling over the black hole's event horizon, the point beyond which nothing can escape and astronomers cannot observe. Tidal disruption flares carry important information about how this debris initially settles into an accretion disk. For More InformationSee [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/swift-maps-a-stars-death-spiral-into-a-black-hole](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/swift-maps-a-stars-death-spiral-into-a-black-hole) Related pages

A star approaching too close to a massive black hole is torn apart by tidal forces, as shown in this artist's rendering. Filaments containing much of the star's mass fall toward the black hole. Eventually these gaseous filaments merge into a smooth, hot disk glowing brightly in X-rays. As the disk forms, its central region heats up tremendously, which drives a flow of material, called a wind, away from the disk. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI LabWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.For complete transcript, click here. Same as above. No music or editing. Astronomers have observed material being blown away from a black hole after it tore a star apart, using a trio of X-ray telescopes. The artist's illustration depicts material from a shredded star (reddish-orange streak) that is pulled towards the black hole. The X-ray spectrum obtained with Chandra provides information about how material starts falling toward the black hole, plus evidence for a wind carrying some of the material away from the black hole.Credit: Spectrum: NASA/CXC/U.Michigan/J.Miller et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss 3840x2160 resolution still image from animation. This artist’s rendering illustrates new findings about a star shredded by a black hole. When a star wanders too close to a black hole, intense tidal forces rip the star apart. In these events, called “tidal disruptions,” some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speed while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for a few years. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer, and ESA/NASA’s XMM-Newton collected different pieces of this astronomical puzzle in a tidal disruption event called ASASSN-14li, which was found in an optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole estimated to weigh a few million times the mass of the sun in the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 million light-years away. Astronomers hope to find more events like ASASSN-14li to test theoretical models about how black holes affect their environments. For More InformationSee [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/destroyed-star-rains-onto-black-hole-winds-blow-it-back.html](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/destroyed-star-rains-onto-black-hole-winds-blow-it-back.html) Related pages

Beauty pass animation showing the spacecraft moving into sunlight and past the Earth to end facing out into space. Animation of the Swift spacecraft. Related pages

On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star. In one model, illustrated here, a sun-like star on an eccentric orbit plunges too close to its galaxy's central black hole. About half of the star's mass feeds an accretion disk around the black hole, which in turn powers a particle jet that beams radiation toward Earth. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab Same animation as above, with music.For complete transcript, click here. This illustration steps through the events that scientists think likely resulted in Swift J1644+57. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Swift This illustration steps through the events that scientists think likely resulted in Swift J1644+57. No Labels. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Swift Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. The first flares from the source likely coincided with the disk's creation, thought to have occurred when a star wandering too close to the black hole was torn apart. Credit: NASA/Swift/Penn State Swift's X-Ray Telescope continues to record high-energy flares from Swift J1644+57 more than three months after the source's first appearance. Astronomers believe that this behavior represents the slow depletion of gas in an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole. The first flares from the source likely coincided with the disk's creation, thought to have occurred when a star wandering too close to the black hole was torn apart. No Labels.Credit: NASA/Swift/Penn State Positions from Swift's XRT constrained the source to a small patch of sky that contains a faint galaxy known to be 3.9 billion light-years away. But to link the Swift event to the galaxy required observations at radio wavelengths, which showed that the galaxy's center contained a brightening radio source. Analysis of that source using the Expanded Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) shows that it is still expanding at more than half the speed of light. Credit: NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al. Positions from Swift's XRT constrained the source to a small patch of sky that contains a faint galaxy known to be 3.9 billion light-years away. But to link the Swift event to the galaxy required observations at radio wavelengths, which showed that the galaxy's center contained a brightening radio source. Analysis of that source using the Expanded Very Large Array and Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) shows that it is still expanding at more than half the speed of light. No Labels. Credit: NRAO/CfA/Zauderer et al. Images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-Ray telescopes (yellow and red) were combined to make this view of Swift J1644+57. Evidence of the flares is seen only in the X-ray image, which is a 3.4-hour exposure taken on March 28, 2011. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler Images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-Ray telescopes (yellow and red) were combined to make this view of Swift J1644+57. Evidence of the flares is seen only in the X-ray image, which is a 3.4-hour exposure taken on March 28, 2011. No Labels.Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler Still from animation Still from animation. This illustration highlights the principal features of Swift J1644+57 and summarizes what astronomers have discovered about it. (There are two versions of the image here. One with labels and one without labels.) Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center In late March 2011, NASA's Swift satellite alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from a new source in the constellation Draco. They soon realized that the source, which is now known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event — the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away that the radiation from the blast has traveled 3.9 billion years before reaching Earth. Most galaxies, including our own, possess a central supersized black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass. According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole lurking at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees. The innermost gas in the disk spirals toward the black hole, where rapid motion and magnetism creates dual, oppositely directed "funnels" through which some particles may escape. Particle jets driving matter at velocities greater than 80-90 percent the speed of light form along the black hole's spin axis. In the case of Swift J1644+57, one of these jets happened to point straight at Earth.Theoretical studies of tidally disrupted stars suggested that they would appear as flares at optical and ultraviolet energies. The brightness and energy of a black hole's jet is greatly enhanced when viewed head-on. The phenomenon, called relativistic beaming, explains why Swift J1644+57 was seen at X-ray energies and appeared so strikingly luminous. When first detected on March 28, the flares were initially assumed to signal a gamma-ray burst, one of the nearly daily short blasts of high-energy radiation often associated with the death of a massive star and the birth of a black hole in the distant universe. But as the emission continued to brighten and flare, astronomers realized that the most plausible explanation was the tidal disruption of a sun-like star seen as beamed emission. For More InformationSee [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/devoured-star.html](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/devoured-star.html) Related pages