NASA celebrates the monsters that suck in light, matter, and everything else that comes too close to them during Black Hole Week. Black holes are not impossible to imagine because they eat light. As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has shared a selection of some of the best visualization of black holes so you can get an idea of what these mind-bending phenomena are like.

If you want to decorate your device with black hole imagery, you can use the images as desktop and mobile wallpaper. There is a simulation of a system with two interacting black holes.

These two black holes are just 40 orbits away from merging in this simulation of the light their environment emits as they dance.
These two black holes are just 40 orbits away from merging in this simulation of the light their environment emits as they dance. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

A visualization of a black hole.

This image shows the warped view of a larger supermassive black hole (red) when it passes almost directly behind a companion black hole (blue) with half its mass. The gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a surreal collection of arcs.
This image shows the warped view of a larger supermassive black hole (red) when it passes almost directly behind a companion black hole (blue) with half its mass. The gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a surreal collection of arcs. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

An illustration of the disk of matter swirling around a black hole, called the accretion disk, which will eventually be sucked into the black hole once it passes the event horizon, as well as an incredibly hot region called the corona which sends X-rays streaming out into space:

A black hole pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk in this illustration of a black hole named MAXI J1820+070. Above the disk is a region of superhot subatomic particles called the corona.
A black hole pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk in this illustration of a black hole named MAXI J1820+070. Above the disk is a region of superhot subatomic particles called the corona. Aurore Simonnet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

An image showing the bustling center of our universe, where objects dance around a black hole.

The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole weighing about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars, and beautiful tendrils of radio emission. This new composite image shows Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.
The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole weighing about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars, and white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars, and beautiful tendrils of radio emission. This new composite image shows Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. X-Ray:NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Radio:NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT

A visible light image taken by Hubble shows the huge jets of energy given off by a black hole in a galaxy.

Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A as imaged by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico.
Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A as imaged by Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico. NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Black holes were thought to be impossible to image because of their light-darking properties. The first ever image of a black hole was captured by the event horizon telescope. They were able to use radio telescopes from all over the world to capture signals from the edge of an event horizon, the boundary of a black hole. The black hole is 55 million light-years away.

The event horizon telescope team is preparing for a big announcement. The results of a finding in the Milky Way will be presented by the EHT team this week. There is a chance that a picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, is on the way.

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