Until several years ago, most cinematic and artistic depictions of black holes — including many in the pages of Nature — failed to match the known facts. A black hole (the remnant of a runaway gravitational collapse) often looked like a space whirlpool, or perhaps a simple black sphere representing the event horizon — the surface that constitutes a point of no return for anything that falls inside. This would be pictured either against a background of stars, or surrounded by an ‘accretion disk’. (Think Saturn’s rings, but made of superheated plasma and spiralling in at close to the speed of light.) … Read more
About this blog
A View from the Bridge is the blog for Books and Arts, culture hub of the top international science journal Nature. Here you’ll find essays on the nexus of science and the arts, reviews of relevant books and exhibitions, musings on science fiction and much, much more. To explore the whole of Books and Arts content, see nature.com/booksandarts.
Barbara Kiser, Books and Arts Editor