AELVOX Explorer

This part needs a little more room.

To give you the better quality this explorer deserves, we suggest opening it on a tablet or laptop. The visuals are calmer there, the controls have space to breathe, and the cosmos looks a little less cramped.

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Black Hole Explorer

AELVOX · Gargantua

Every pixel follows a real light ray through a spinning black hole’s curved spacetime. Drag to orbit, scroll to move closer, click anywhere to trace that ray.

Current spacetime

Event horizon
ISCO (disk inner edge)
Photon orbits pro / retro
Camera
Camera motion
Time dilation
Disk
Miller’s planet (story spin)

What the film changed

Rendered at spin a/M = 0.6, not the near-extremal spin of the story, so the shadow stayed round and the disk centred.
Left out Doppler and gravitational colour shifts and relativistic beaming, which make one side of the disk blue and blinding and the other red and dim.
Gave the disk a uniform 4,500 K temperature and an artist-made texture, and kept it anemic so the crew would survive.
Added IMAX lens flare. Here it becomes the optional “film lens glow”.

Source: James, von Tunzelmann, Franklin & Thorne, Classical and Quantum Gravity 32, 065001 (2015). Mass 10⁸ M☉; story spin 1 − 1.3×10⁻¹⁴ (Thorne).

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