Multimedia Gallery - Artist’s rendition with first published black hole simulation

June 11, 2022

Artist’s rendition with first published black hole simulation

People have imagined what black holes look like since they were predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago. In the top right of this artist’s rendition is the first published simulation of a black hole, produced by Jean-Pierre Luminet of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. The simulation was published in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1979. Today, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration uses observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes to make amazing black hole discoveries like Sagittarius A* and M87*.

This still is from the NSF video Introducing Sagittarius A* (the Milky Way Black Hole).

Learn more in the NSF news release Astrophysicists detect first black hole-neutron star mergers and in this "Science Matters" story. Or learn more about black holes and how they're studied. (Date of image: 2022; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: June 11, 2022)

Credit: Keyi "Onyx" Li, National Science Foundation; Jean-Pierre Luminet/CNRS; Phototheque

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