Black Hole Simulation
by Ryan Szypowski.

Last update=3 Jan, 2001

This project involved generating light-like geodesic curves around Kerr-Newman black holes. This in essence simulates the paths which light would follow when near a rotating and/or charged black hole.

More specifically, a package which used an embedded Runge-Kutta method for numerical solutions to differential equations was written in C++. Then, the differential equations describing space-time curvature in Kerr-Newman geometry were written up as a function in C++ and solved using the Runge-Kutta routine. The final results obtained are in the form of movies where each frame shows the paths that light would follow if it was emitted from a point source near a black hole with certain mass, angular momentum, and charge. Subsequent frames are simply changes in the parameters.

Three movies are available. The movies are in Quicktime format, with Cinepak compression (and hence they work in xanim).

• Movie 1 -- Increasing only the angular momentum (2.9MB)
• A snapshot from movie 1
• Movie 2 -- Increasing all of angular momentum, charge, and mass. Reaches the point where the light source hits the horizon (real nifty) (5.3MB)
• The picture in the header is a snapshot from movie 2
• Movie 3 -- Increasing mass and charge (3.4MB)
• A snapshot from movie 3

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