Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. They can be more massive than a billion suns. Matter in their surrounding gets trapped and accelerated to almost the speed of light, where it ends up behind the point-of-no-return: the event horizon. In Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology, Jordy Davelaar and team explore the theory behind these beasts by computing the plasma flows and radiation around them to understand how we observe them with telescopes, with the help of virtual reality.
This blog was originally posted at SpringerOpen
In our most recent paper in Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology we present our latest Virtual Reality visualization. The simulation is based on the black hole in the center of our own Galaxy; Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). The mass of it; four million times more massive than our own sun. Sgr A* has been studied extensively in the past. But most of these works tried to understand how the object looks like from the point of view of an observer very far out. In this work, we decide to dive into the flow itself by including as much physics as possible.