Observational Appearance of An Accretion Disk (VIDEO)

University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center

Caption

The light rays emitted from the inner part of the disk are bent before their arrival to the 'telescope' due to the gravitational lensing effect and produce the distorted images. The disk is viewed from 45 degrees above the equatorial plane of the disk. Left side of the image is brighter than the right side due to the Doppler beaming effect: light emitted from a substance moving toward an observer is brighter than that of light moving away from the observer. The central black part is the 'shadow' of the black hole, which is what EHT was trying to see.

Credit

Hotaka Shiokawa

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