Blackhole
A spinning black hole, with the light around it traced live.
- Event horizon
- Innermost stable orbit
- Hottest gas in the disk
- Mass the disk turns into light
- 1 M
- Time runs at
- Angle from spin axis
- Distance
- The star
- Tidal radius
- Closest approach
- Star's radius
- First gas back
- Most gas coming back
- Gas coming back now
- 1 M
- Angle from spin axis
- Distance
Drag to orbit. Scroll or pinch to zoom. With the view focused, arrow keys orbit, + and − zoom, and Space plays or pauses.
Lengths are in M, the hole's mass written as a length.
Depth is the tidal radius, where the hole pulls the star apart, over how close the star would pass the hole on a Newtonian orbit. Too deep and the star falls in. Gas is drawn at the temperature it shines at; where streams of it collide it is heated to hundreds of thousands of kelvin. The gas that has come back feeds a disk inside the ring it settles in, at most at the Eddington rate.
The accretion rate is how fast gas falls in, as a share of what makes the disk shine at the Eddington luminosity, where the light's push on the gas balances gravity. The disk glows mostly in ultraviolet or X-rays; you see its visible light. A heavier hole's disk is cooler, so its light is redder.