by Cameron Dudzisz

Introduction

Black holes are one of the most awe-inspiring and powerful phenomena known to humankind, and their bizarre properties that are counterintuitive to the average person give them a powerful mystique in the public consciousness. There are many things in space, from stars and supernovae to nebulas and galaxies, that dwarf all of human existence, but only black holes have such a literal presence in space-time as to seemingly break the foundation of the universe- an object so dense, with gravity so powerful, light cannot escape it. The gravity of the Earth can be briefly overcome by simply jumping. The gravity of the Sun is strong enough to keep the planets of the solar system revolving around it. A black hole has gravity so intense that it warps light that simply passes near it, and like the Hotel California, light that goes too close can never leave. It is with these thoughts that I wanted to examine the timeline of black hole discoveries and visualizations in science, and how those translate to media depictions.

Materials & Methods

The primary tool I used was TimelineJS3 by Northwestern University Knight Lab, a free browser-based program that utilizes a Google Slides template to quickly and easily create dynamic timelines by inputting text, images, captions, videos, etc. into the template. No design or programming knowledge is required, as the program automatically formats the timeline and slides based on the plaintext and links entered into the rows. More advanced users can also utilize HTML/CSS markups and Javascript directly in the template to edit the final timeline.

Citations within Wikipedia were a jumping-off point for finding research, and images hosted on Wikipedia were a significant contribution to what I used. The Nasa.gov website was a critical resource for both images and explanations for aiding wrap my head around what I was reading and attempting to decipher, especially the research papers far beyond my knowledge and mathematical skill level.

For the background hue, I used the htmlcodes.com color selector to find a dark shade of purple, which then automatically provided me the hexadecimal (#2A1E2E) of the color I selected. I wanted to use a dark purple that has a “deep space” appearance while still being noticeably distinct from a flat black to help create the illusion of the visualizations over deep space.

Results

The most surprising thing to me about the research and visualization of black holes is how incredibly recent much of it is. Many of the breakthroughs in visualization occured in the last ten to fifteen years, and a good amount in the last three. Although the first formation of the concept appeared in the 1700’s and was occasionally worked on by physicists and astronomers in the 1800’s, it wasn’t until Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity did black holes an important subject of study in astronomy, and the “Golden Age” of black holes was as recent as the 1970’s. Many of the key pioneers and original specialists in black hole research still have active careers today. I was also surprised to find fairly few actual visualizations within the original literature, outside of a few very complex and somewhat difficult to read diagrams.

In hindsight, it probably shouldn’t have been all that surprising that an extremely mathematics heavy field would mostly focus on “showing their work,” so to speak, with mathematical formulas versus flashy visualizations. Most black hole depictions are artistic interpretations made with that data for public relations or education purposes but not directly as part of the scentific research, or are pop cultural depictions that weren’t made with any scientific rigor ( for instance, black holes do not “suck” as often depicted in public media) or particular care for accuracy. in particular, there is a wealth of up-to-date visualizations after 2014 and 2019, respectively, when black holes reentered the public conciousness following the sci-fi drama Interstellar, which featured a highly accurate black hole as a major plot point and feature in its marketing, and the 2019 publication of the first direct image of a black hole at the center of gaxaxy M87 and its surrounding accretion disk (as the black hole itself is literally invisible, it is the disk that is visible with hole itself as a void in the middle) which made headline news.

Another thing that shocked me was how much data was required to image the M87 black hole. It required over four petabytes of data to generate that image; a single petabyte is over 500 billion pages of text, or twice as much data as the total published research in the U.S. All that for one blurry, reddish-orange view of one of the most astounding features of the universe.

Reflections

Little knowledge of HTML or CSS, and none at all of Javascript, means that I could not take advantage of TimelineJS3’s more powerful customization abilities. While this is a small drawback for this individual project, improving my knowledge of those tools would mean I could more effectively customize the timeline’s appearance and features. Adding interactive features within timeline slides could help visualizing some of the more difficult to grasp aspects of black holes, such as how light bends around the singularity. Much of the math actually used to create these visualization also flies far over my head. More time to absorb and understand the actual mathematics would be useful in explaining what is happening, both in terms of how the data is translated into images and what the math itself signifies.