B How Do Black Hole Animations Capture Optical Effects?

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The discussion focuses on the optical effects captured in black hole animations, emphasizing that these visuals are not meant to represent real-time orbits but rather to illustrate complex phenomena. Participants note that the animation likely speeds up the interactions and does not depict actual merging of the black holes. The distance between the black holes is estimated to be significant, suggesting that the simulation approximates Newtonian orbits, resulting in a sped-up portrayal. There is curiosity about the computational effort involved, with estimates indicating extensive use of a large processor cluster for the simulation. Overall, the conversation highlights the challenges of accurately representing black hole dynamics through animation.
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Very cool. Did they also make their equations available somewhere?
 
Also, I looked but could not find if the speed of the animation is real-time, or sped up. Did anybody see if they mentioned that?
 
berkeman said:
Also, I looked but could not find if the speed of the animation is real-time, or sped up. Did anybody see if they mentioned that?
My impression is that there is no attempt to show time or actual orbits. The objects in the animation never really merge or spiral inward. The purpose was to show optical effects.
 
It is almost certainly solved numerically and it is certainly sped up. These black holes are severla light minutes across.
 
anorlunda said:
My impression is that there is no attempt to show time or actual orbits. The objects in the animation never really merge or spiral inward. The purpose was to show optical effects.
The holes aren't that close. The center to center distance is something like ten times the diameter of the inner bright ring around the larger hole. That ring is at the photon sphere, so the holes are something like thirty times the Schwarzschild radius of the larger hole distant from one another (I know they're Kerr holes, but back of the envelope). I don't think approximating the orbits as Newtonian is completely crazy at this level of hand waving, and that gives an orbital period of several hours. So definitely sped up.

I'm not sure how much time solving Einstein's Field Equations numerically would require in this case. The blurb reckons they used 2% of a 129,000 processor cluster for a day, or a little over 60,000 hours of computer time. That seems a little bit steep to me for just ray tracing (even nice high-res ray tracing in curved spacetime), so I lean towards it being a proper simulation (although that's, at best, only a partially educated guess).
 
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