Comment by lupsasca
4 days ago
Yes, agreed. We thought it would be fair to call it a "simulation" of what your surroundings would look like if a black hole were within your FOV, but as you say we do not take into account all effects (time delays in particular would require a lot of buffering and we decided this would be impractical to implement, and not that illuminating).
This is still nice when there are so many artistic images of black holes that do not take such care to use known physics to create an accurate image. Well done all. Looking forward to seeing what BHEX sees.
Glad to hear you're excited about BHEX---we are too!
If you want to read more about what it's going to do, I wrote a blog post about it on the mission website: https://www.blackholeexplorer.org/bhex-blog/lupsasca-stateme...
Read all of it, only question I have is... napkin math, how much more resolution over EHT alone?
2 replies →
You're right that the time delays and redshifting wouldn't add much to a toy app, but some of us are here for the physics.
Honestly it's not so far-fetched (to me) that in a few years someone will have GRRMHD simulations running in real time on a portable device.
Are you familiar with A Slower Speed of Light? It's a game which has some nice special-relativistic effects.
http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
Yes, such a great game---it's a fantastic visualization of special relativity and also fun to play!
I think we're still a ways off from real time GRMHD sims, but CK Chan from UArizona had a working VR simulation (on the Oculus iirc, but now deprecated) that allowed you to explore a pre-existing GRMHD simulation in real time and in 3D. I think he might be working on a new version of this.
That's awesome. It's extra crucial to have engaging outreach when your research is so far from application. There's so much scope for wowing people with astro and if you can enrich our culture and justify funding at the same time that's a win-win.
(Just for clarity the second R in GRRMHD is for radiation. I know it's typical to just push some photons through the GRMHD results to produce renders, bit since I'm dreaming let's treat the radiation self-consistently.)
2 replies →
I've been able to port NR to GPU's which with sufficiently powerful hardware can run simulations at about ~30fps with raytracing, to simulate binary black hole collisions. You need something around a top end consumer gpu at the moment. Phone hardware needs a while to catch up, there's an absolute minimum memory requirement of ~8gb vram, and you need a lot more bandwidth than they currently support
Awesome! Is it published anywhere? All the stuff I'm familiar with is aimed at old-school clusters.