Black holes are known to have extremely powerful gravitational pulls, so strong that they swallow everything around them. Even light can’t escape black holes. But this doesn’t mean that black holes are invisible. They collect dust and gas clouds that form a structure called an accretion disk around them. These disks emit light and form and appear in a hump shape, as shown in popular films like Interstellar.

Now, the space agency has released a video that visualizes what happens when two black holes pass each other. The video shows how their gravity warps the accretion disk of the other. The bigger black hole which is 200 times the mass of our Sun, is represented in orange, while the small is shown in blue color. The extreme gravitational pull creat twisted warping of the disks.

In reality, the light in such a scenario would be in UV range rather than visible light range. But the material orbiting the smaller black hole will certainly experience more powerful gravitational pulls, making it hotter. Such visualizations are made to help astronomers understand what features they can expect while investigating real black holes.

“We’re seeing two supermassive black holes, a larger one with 200 million solar masses and a smaller companion weighing half as much,” said Jeremy Schnittman, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center creator of the visualization. “These are the kinds of black hole binary systems where we think both members could maintain accretion disks lasting millions of years.”

The visualization also imitates a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, where a huge body distorts the image of a body behind it. This could also work to examine stars and exoplanets that are far away.

 “A striking aspect of this new visualization is the self-similar nature of the images produced by gravitational lensing,” Schnittman explained. “Zooming into each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly distorted images of its partner.”