Skip to content

MissArray/Messier_87_Black_Hole

Repository files navigation

Messier_87_Black_Hole

Description

An attempt to re-create the Messier 87 black hole with Adobe Illustrator and animate it with CSS. The animation is coded entirely in CSS. A tiny bit of JavaScript was used to toggle the details panel.

URL

https://missarray.github.io/Messier_87_Black_Hole/

Licence

Code: MIT

Concept & Graphics

© Artemis Gause 2019 - All rights reserved.

Notes

The depicted black hole is not a modified image, but was created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator. The original image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of Messier 87 can be viewed here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/universe/20190410/blackhole20190410-16.jpg

You'll notice that the star-studded background is still. The reason for not animating it is that in outer space, due to the lack of an atomsphere, stars do not appear to twinkle, as they do when seen from the Earth. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-stars-twinkle/

The story behind the image

The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy Messier 87 (or M87 for short), or rather the stellar material that is spirals gradually into the hole, was captured by eight finely co-ordinated radio telescopes that together formed the Event Horizon Telescope.

Galaxy M87 is 55 million light-years away from earth and the supermassive hole at its heart is an unfathomable 6.5 billion times as big as our Sun.

The name of this equally supermassive telescope - Event Horizon - describes the ultimate point that anything within a black hole's gravitational pull can reach in recognisable form, before being sucked into the black hole forever.

You can read more about the M87 black hole here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7372

About

My tribute to the Event Horizon Telescope first-ever image of a black hole

Topics

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published