Explore how the extreme gravity of two orbiting supermassive black holes distorts our view

In this visualization, disks of bright, hot, churning gas encircle two 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.⁣ ⁣ Visualizations like this help scientists picture the fascinating consequences of extreme gravity’s funhouse mirror. On a modern desktop computer, the calculations needed to make this would have taken about a decade. But using just 2% of NASA’s Discover supercomputer’s 129,000 processors, these computations took about a day.⁣