the more illustrious black hole

I would just like to document a few of the illustrations of black holes that I find compelling.

The one is an artist conception from NASA/JPL-Caltech showing a supermassive black hole at the center, surrounded by matter flowing onto the black hole in an accretion disk. This disk forms as the dust and gas in the galaxy falls onto the hole, attracted by its gravity:

It was used in a report on a recently discovered super massive black hole that is so super massive that it pokes a hole into the current theory on the growth of black holes, even.

Another artist conception focuses on a binary system where one star has collapsed into a black hole and eats its companion (a phenomena earlier referenced in this blog).   It is from the wikipedia entry on the accretion disc:

An actual image of the phenomena captured with the Hubble Telescope by L. Ferrarese of Johns Hopkins University and NASA is also listed in the same entry:

Other NASA concept drawings are available on the wikipedia commons.  This one focuses on the center of the accretion disc where the event horizon shows itself as the light sucking center of the formation leading to the singularity where all current theories are broken down into hints, whispers, conjectures and shrugs:

The last diagram, from a Inspirehep.net a high energy physics publication of a short article by Volker Beckmann (Francois Arago Centre / APC Paris) and Chris R. Shrader (NASA/GSFC), shows that Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) will look differently as differing angles of site.  Particularly interesting to me is the inclusion of one of the most compelling abstract shapes of all, the torus, here in cross-section representing the dusty absorber around the accretion disc:

0 G Space Art

On 4 April 1998, artist Frank Pietronigro flew aboard a NASA KC135 turbojet, often called the Vomit Comet, over the Gulf of Mexico from Houston’s Johnson Space Center and "experienced the awe-inspiring sensation of creating art in a microgravity environment as scientific research."

His his Research Project Number 34 was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist's famed experiments with gravity's effect on paint.  Carried out in free fall inside a kind of plastic tent, Pietronigro's "drift paintings" caught the serendipitous and spontaneous flow of the paint released from pastry tubes in the microgravity environment without the structural support of a traditional horizontally oriented canvas.  

Ah . . ., so much for the days when NASA had a budget for Abstract Expressionism in space.

Pietronigro continued to pursue art in microgravity by co-founding the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium in 2003, an international space art organization committed to increasing artists’ access to microgravity environments including parabolic flights and the International Space Station.