A research paper published online this week in Physical Review Letters delves into the effects of black hole collisions in unprecedented detail. "We've found ways to visualize warped space-time like never before," Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne said in a news release.
Thorne and his colleagues at Caltech, Cornell University and the National Institute for Theoretical Physics in South Africa combined theory and computer simulations to describe the beautiful patterns of gravitation force lines emanating from black holes. Such lines are analogous to the invisible field lines created by electromagnetic forces.
In some scenarios, warping space-time creates swirls of force lines that twist around each other in a region of space called a vortex. "Anything that falls into a vortex gets spun around and around," said Cornell physicist Robert Owen, the paper's lead author. An astronaut falling through a gravitational vortex would be wrung out like a wet towel.
Tendex lines describe the stretching effect of a strong gravitational field. "Tendex lines sticking out of the moon raise the tides on the earth's oceans," said David Nichols, the Caltech graduate student who coined the term. When many such lines are bunched together, as in the surroundings of a black hole, that creates a super-stretching region called a tendex. An astronaut passing through a tidal tendex would be pulled apart like taffy — an effect sometimes known as "spaghettification."
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