Black-Hole Mergers Cast a Kaleidoscope of Eyebrow-Shaped Shadows

In Interstellar, the science-fiction film out this week, Matthew McConaughey stars as an astronaut contending with a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. The film’s special effects have been hailed as the most realistic depiction ever made of this type of cosmic object.

But astrophysicists have now gone one better. They have calculated for the first time what an observer would see if two black holes — each drastically warping the fabric of space and time according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity — spiralled into each other and merged. The researchers’ simulations (see video below) reveal how the image of each black hole circles around the other and gets multiplied in a rapidly shape-shifting kaleidoscope. Andy Bohn of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and his colleagues unveiled the results on 30 October in a paper posted on the arxiv.org repository.

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