Blackhole

Light bending around a spinning black hole, traced live.

Event horizon

Innermost stable orbit

Disk's inner edge

Hottest gas in the disk

Gas falling in

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.

The accretion rate is how fast gas falls in, as a share of what a thin disk takes to shine at the Eddington luminosity, where the light's push on the gas balances gravity. At high rates the gas forms a thin disk. It glows mostly in ultraviolet or X-rays; you see its visible light.

Below a few percent, a hot corona evaporates the disk from the inside out, and its inner edge recedes. Inside it the gas cannot cool and swells into a hot flow that light passes through, as around M87* and Sgr A*. It glows in radio. You see its light at 1.3 mm, the wavelength of the Event Horizon Telescope, in false colour.