Black Hole Week

Have you ever thought about visiting a black hole? We sure hope not. However, if you're absolutely convinced that a black hole is your ideal vacation spot, watch this video before you blast off to learn more about them and (more importantly) how to stay safe.You can also download a handy safety brochure, watch short clips to learn different things about black holes, and even get some short glimpses into the lives of black holes and the explorers that want to visit them. || Safety VideoThis handy video will help get you oriented before your trip (that we still wish you wouldn't take). Learn more about black holes, how to find them, and how to stay safe on your travels!Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: "Prim and Proper" from Universal Production MusicComplete transcript available.A Spanish-language is also available below. ||

This page will introduce you to the world, characters, colors, and fonts of Black Hole Week. NASA celebrated Black Hole Week in 2019, 2021 and May, 2022.The world of Black Hole Week is bold, colorful, and a bit retro. It's also populated by a fun bunch of characters, including a little blue explorer (called the "Traveler") and their black hole friends. Below, you'll find tons of helpful images, GIFs, and other materials to get you going if you want to join in!If you are having trouble downloading the ZIP or AI files, please contact Barb Mattson: barb.mattson@nasa.gov ||

Black Hole WeekThis page provides social media assets used during previous celebrations of Black Hole Week. The world of Black Hole Week is populated by a fun bunch of characters, including a little blue explorer (called the Traveler) and their cosmic friends.Below, you'll find tons of GIFs to download and use if you want to join in! || A black hole is a superdense object in space. Its surface, called an event horizon, is a boundary beyond which everything, including light, cannot escape. At its heart is a point where gravity and density are infinite – the singularity.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center ||

So you’ve planned your trip to a black hole, you’ve packed your bags, and you’ve even watched the pre-flight safety video. If you haven’t yet watched the video, however, we highly recommend you click the image below. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.Now then, want to make black hole travel an even bigger part of your daily life? Wishing that black holes actually WERE portals to dimensions filled with unicorns and space potatoes? Download these phone and desktop wallpapers to fill your screens. || Wallpaper: Explorer and Black HoleA snapshot of our favorite explorer and its friend(?) the black hole. Available for both desktops and smartphones.Download the desktop version here.Download the smartphone version here.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center ||

Wish you were here! Now, you can send your friends postcards from one of the most extreme vacation spots in the universe—or at least convince them you've gone even though you stayed safe at home. || Postcard: Black HoleWhy would you visit a black hole? No, seriously, why would you? It's dangerous! This postcard will help remind all your friends of your memorable trip—and why they might not want to go themselves.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center || Postcard: Event HorizonSee the sights (or lack thereof)! Go past the point of no return! Get stretched into a giant noodle! Your friends will be jealous of your adventures at the event horizon when they receive this postcard. Or, more importantly, if they receive it.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center ||

Black Hole WeekThis page provides social media assets used during previous celebrations of Black Hole Week. Join in! Below, you'll find many GIFs to use. || In this visualization, a binary system containing two supermassive black holes and their accretion disks circle each other, revealing the dramatic distortions produced by their gravity. The different colors of the accretion disks make it easier to track where light from each black hole turns up.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell ||

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. || 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. Download the desktop version here.Download the smartphone version here.Credit: Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018 ||

All monster black holes are not equal. Watch this video to see how they compare to each other and to our solar system. The black holes shown, which range from 100,000 to more than 60 billion times our Sun’s mass, are scaled according to the sizes of their shadows – a circular zone about twice the size of their event horizons. Only one of these colossal objects resides in our own galaxy, and it lies 26,000 light-years away. Smaller black holes are shown in bluish colors because their gas is expected to be hotter than that orbiting larger ones. Scientists think all of these objects shine most intensely in ultraviolet light. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image LabMusic: "In the Stars" from Universal Production MusicWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. ||

Learn more about the best-known black hole systems in our galaxy and its neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. This visualization presents 22 X-ray binary systems that host confirmed black holes at the same scale, with their orbits sped up by about 22,000 times. The view of each system reflects how we see it from Earth. Star colors ranging from blue-white to reddish represent temperatures from 5 times hotter to 45% cooler than our Sun. In most of these systems, a stream of matter from the star forms an accretion disk around the black hole. In others, like the famous system called Cygnus X-1, the star produces a hefty outflow that is partly swept up by the black hole’s gravity to form the disk. The accretion disks use a different color scheme because they sport even higher temperatures than the stars. The largest disk shown, belonging to a binary called GRS 1915, spans a distance greater than that separating Mercury from our Sun. The black holes themselves are shown larger than in reality using spheres scaled to reflect their masses.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Scientific Visualization StudioMusic: "Event Horizon" from Gravity. Written and produced by Lars LeonhardWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. ||

Watch eight model stars stretch and deform as they approach a virtual black hole 1 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole’s gravity rips some stars apart into a stream of gas, a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. Others manage to withstand their close encounters. These simulations show that destruction and survival depend on the stars’ initial densities. Yellow represents the greatest densities, blue the least dense. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Taeho Ryu (MPA)Music: "Lava Flow Instrumental" from Universal Production MusicWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. ||

Explore how the extreme gravity of two orbiting supermassive black holes distorts our view. In this visualization, disks of bright, hot, churning gas encircle both black holes, shown in red and blue to better track the light source. The red disk orbits the larger black hole, which weighs 200 million times the mass of our Sun, while its smaller blue companion weighs half as much. Zooming into each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly warped images of its partner. Watch to learn more. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. PowellMusic: "Gravitational Field" from Orbit. Written and produced by Lars Leonhard.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. ||

Text-on-screen explainer of the above.Credit: NASA/Bernard J. Kelly (Goddard and Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County), Chris Henze (Ames) and Tim Sandstrom (CSC Government Solutions LLC)Complete transcript available. || || This visualization shows gravitational waves emitted by two black holes (black spheres) of nearly equal mass as they spiral together and merge. Yellow structures near the black holes illustrate the strong curvature of space-time in the region. Orange ripples represent distortions of space-time caused by the rapidly orbiting masses. These distortions spread out and weaken, ultimately becoming gravitational waves (purple). The merger timescale depends on the masses of the black holes. For a system containing black holes with about 30 times the sun’s mass, similar to the one detected by LIGO in 2015, the orbital period at the start of the movie is just 65 milliseconds, with the black holes moving at about 15 percent the speed of light. Space-time distortions radiate away orbital energy and cause the binary to contract quickly. As the two black holes near each other, they merge into a single black hole that settles into its "ringdown" phase, where the final gravitational waves are emitted. For the 2015 LIGO detection, these events played out in little more than a quarter of a second. This simulation was performed on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center. At maximum resolution this visualization is 8192x8192 pixels in size.Credit: NASA/Bernard J. Kelly (Goddard and Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County), Chris Henze (Ames) and Tim Sandstrom (CSC Government Solutions LLC) ||

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 ||

Gas glows brightly in this computer simulation of supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging. Models like this may eventually help scientists pinpoint real examples of these powerful binary systems. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018Music: "Games Show Sphere 01" from Killer TracksWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. || A new model is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding the kinds of light signals produced when two supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, spiral toward a collision. For the first time, a new computer simulation that fully incorporates the physical effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity shows that gas in such systems will glow predominantly in ultraviolet and X-ray light. The new simulation shows three orbits of a pair of supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging. The models reveal the light emitted at this stage of the process may be dominated by UV light with some high-energy X-rays, similar to what’s seen in any galaxy with a well-fed supermassive black hole. Three regions of light-emitting gas glow as the black holes merge, all connected by streams of hot gas: a large ring encircling the entire system, called the circumbinary disk, and two smaller ones around each black hole, called mini disks. All these objects emit predominantly UV light. When gas flows into a mini disk at a high rate, the disk’s UV light interacts with each black hole’s corona, a region of high-energy subatomic particles above and below the disk. This interaction produces X-rays. When the accretion rate is lower, UV light dims relative to the X-rays. Based on the simulation, which ran on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the researchers expect X-rays emitted by a near-merger will be brighter and more variable than X-rays seen from single supermassive black holes. The pace of the changes links to both the orbital speed of gas located at the inner edge of the circumbinary disk as well as that of the merging black holes. ||