Universe  ID: 14146

Black Hole Desktop & Phone Wallpapers

Released on May 4, 2022
While black holes can’t emit their own light, matter surrounding and falling toward it can create quite a light show. Here you’ll find a collection of data visualizations, illustrations, and telescope images of black hole environments.

Download these phone and desktop wallpapers for your screens.
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Supermassive Black Hole Binary Simulation

These two black holes are just 40 orbits away from merging in this simulation of the light their environment emits as they dance.

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Download the smartphone version here.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes

This image shows the warped view of a larger supermassive black hole (red) when it passes almost directly behind a companion black hole (blue) with half its mass. The gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a surreal collection of arcs.

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Download the smartphone version here. (version 1) and here. (version 2).

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

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Black Hole Accretion Disk and Corona

A black hole pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk in this illustration of a black hole named MAXI J1820+070. Above the disk is a region of superhot subatomic particles called the corona.

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Download the smartphone version here.

Credit: Aurore Simonnet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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A Multiwavelength View of the Milky Way’s Center

The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole weighing about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars, and beautiful tendrils of radio emission. This new composite image shows Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.

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Download the smartphone version here.

Credit: X-Ray:NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Radio:NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT

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Black Hole Jets in Hercules A

Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A as imaged by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico.

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Download the smartphone version here.

Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Credits

Scott Wiessinger (KBRwyle): Support
Barb Mattson (University of Maryland College Park): Producer
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer
Jeanette Kazmierczak (University of Maryland College Park): Science Writer
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. However, individual items should be credited as indicated above.

Short URL to share this page:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14146

This item is part of these series:
Astrophysics Stills
Black Hole Week

Keywords:
SVS >> Black Hole
NASA Science >> Universe