Recently, NASA came up with a new visualization that shows how black holes work. However, to understand how they work, we must first take a look at the parts of the black hole. This quick overview explains the parts of the black hole.
Remember the first image of a black hole that NASA released? Well, black holes don’t actually have an orange accretion disk. The reason for that color is due to the amount of gas that was sucked into the black hole’s accretion disk. Since a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape it, not everything a black hole sucks actually goes into it. Instead, it just keeps orbiting around it. In an animation that shows how light behaves for an observer on Earth, the observer would notice that gas on the left side appears brighter than the gas on the right. This is because of the Doppler Effect, which is a change in frequency and wavelength of a wave.
Weird things begin to happen when light gets close to a black hole. When it circles a black hole three times, a photon ring is formed. The light from this photon ring is visible to us because after the photons went around the black hole multiple times, they escape and reach our telescopes. Since light can’t escape a black hole, it is to be assumed that the photons were not close enough to this strange celestial body. Besides going through spaghettification, being close to a black hole would also result in time travel due to time dilation.
