Event Horizon Gallery

Visualizing the event horizon and its dynamics are crucial to our understanding. Using IDL and Wavefront, we have created several images and movies, concentrating on the now infamous Pair of Pants spacetime diagram black hole collision. Also, we have created animations showing in detail generators leaving the horizon, and movies and stills of other dynamical black holes.

Contents

• Spacetime Diagrams
• Dynamics of the Two Black Hole collision
• The Evolution of Distorted Black Holes

	By stacking up spacelike slices on top of each other, we can create a spacetime diagram of the Event Horizon. These diagrams allow us to see the global structure of the EH quickly and clearly. Here we have 3 examples of the spacetime diagram. The data set is the EH for the Misner Data, a collision of two black holes with time symmetric initial data. This image was recently featured on the cover of Science Magazine
Pair of Pants (21kB jpeg)	This image shows the pair of pants for a two black hole collision with generators on the pants. You can clearly see the generators leaving the event horizon backwards in time along the seam of the pants. The transparent plane shows a moment of time symmetry.
MPEG Movie (151kB Mpeg)	Here we show the Pair of Pants evolving in time from the point of time symmetry (t=0) up to about t=30M. The data is a head-on collision; the rotation has been added to assist in viewing the data.
VRML Pair of Pants (1.3Mb VRML)	You can take the pair of pants and spin em with your favorite VRML browser. Don't know what VRML is? Check out the NCSA VRML Page, or the Rel Group VRML Page.

	The two black hole collision has the interesting feature that generators join the horizon through a line of caustics along the symmetry axis.
Evolution of Generators (85 kb QT or 250 kB MPEG)	Here you can see the generators join the horizon as they progress forward in time. Generators not on the horizon are purple, and once they join, they are yellow.
Details of the generators (17 KB PostScript)	Here you can see the generators crossing over the line of symmetry as the event horizon merges. Here, the second hole is supressed. This is a figure from the upcoming Paper II.

	Much of our recent work has been studying the dynamics of black holes distorted by gravitational waves, sometimes with very large amplitudes. Here we show some examples of these simulations.
Barber Pole Twist (36 kB JPEG)	Here we show the evolution of the embedding of the equator of a Bowen and York rotating black hole. You can see the generators twisting due to the angular momentum of the black hole.
Corn Cob (Coming Soon )	Here we show the evolution of a highly distorted non-rotating black hole. The initial condition with the generators streched along the very distorted black hole reminds us of a Corn Cob, hence the name. Of course, this may just be a sign that we've been living in the MidWest too long also ...
Napkin Holder (Coming Soon )	The quickly rotating black hole is too distorted to embed in Euclidean Space, thus we cannot visualize the entire embedding. This causes the surface to only be partly embeddable, creating a surface which reminds us of a Napkin Holder.
Cosmic Screw (Coming Soon )	We apply boundary conditions to a rotating black hole such that the hole has the same property of a late time counter-rotating collision (cosmic screw) where the top hole rotates clockwise, and the bottom counter clockwise. You can see the counter-rotation effect in the generators of the surface (yellow dots).