Supercomputer - Blog Posts

A Mesmerizing Model of Monster Black Holes

Just about every galaxy the size of our Milky Way (or bigger) has a supermassive black hole at its center. These objects are ginormous — hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun! Now, we know galaxies merge from time to time, so it follows that some of their black holes should combine too. But we haven’t seen a collision like that yet, and we don’t know exactly what it would look like. 

A new simulation created on the Blue Waters supercomputer — which can do 13 quadrillion calculations per second, 3 million times faster than the average laptop — is helping scientists understand what kind of light would be produced by the gas around these systems as they spiral toward a merger.

The new simulation shows most of the light produced around these two black holes is UV or X-ray light. We can’t see those wavelengths with our own eyes, but many telescopes can. Models like this could tell the scientists what to look for. 

You may have spotted the blank circular region between the two black holes. No, that’s not a third black hole. It’s a spot that wasn’t modeled in this version of the simulation. Future models will include the glowing gas passing between the black holes in that region, but the researchers need more processing power. The current version already required 46 days!

The supermassive black holes have some pretty nifty effects on the light created by the gas in the system. If you view the simulation from the side, you can see that their gravity bends light like a lens. When the black holes are lined up, you even get a double lens!

But what would the view be like from between two black holes? In the 360-degree video above, the system’s gas has been removed and the Gaia star catalog has been added to the background. If you watch the video in the YouTube app on your phone, you can moved the screen around to explore this extreme vista. Learn more about the new simulation here. 

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Scientists are trying a new, interactive way to understand ocean current data with the help of high-resolution global ocean simulations. In the part of the global visualization shown, the Gulf Stream features prominently. Surface water speeds are shown ranging from 0 meters per second (dark blue) to 1.23 meters per second (cyan).

This video is running at one simulation day per second. A team from our Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at our Ames Research Center has developed a new visualization tool that is being used by researchers to study the behavior of ocean currents. The new visualization tool provides high-resolution views of the entire globe at once, allowing the scientists to see new details that they had missed in previous analyses of their simulation, which was run on our Pleiades supercomputer.

For more information, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/scientists-explore-ocean-currents-through-supercomputer-simulations

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