Observing Supermassive Black Holes in Virtual Reality

We present a full VR 360 general-relativistic ray-tracing and radiative transfer calculations of accreting supermassive black holes. We performed state-of-the-art three-dimensional general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations using the BHAC code, subsequently post-processing this data with the radiative transfer code RAPTOR. The VR movie includes all relativistic and general-relativistic effects, such as Doppler boosting and gravitational redshift, as well as geometrical effects due to the local gravitational field and the observer’s changing position and state of motion. We calculated images based on recent best-fit models of observations of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milkyway. The images are generated at four astronomically-relevant observing frequencies and combined to generate a complete 360 Virtual Reality movie of the surrounding environment of the black hole and its event horizon. This work was done as part of BlackHoleCam, an ERC funded research project that is part of the Event Horizon Telescope Consortium, and aims to image the event horizon of a black hole for the very first time! Credits: J. Davelaar, T. Bronzwaer, D. Kok, Z. Younsi, M. Moscibrodzka, & H. Falcke Music credits: T. Bronzwaer BlackHoleCam, Radboud University Nijmegen, Goethe University Frankfurt This work was published in Computation Astrophysics and Cosmology. Full article; Davelaar et al. (2018),