Black hole lab
Bend spacetime with a black hole
A black hole curves the space around it, so light, grids and clocks all follow the same bent geometry. Change the mass, step back to a new distance, and watch every readout below fall out of the same handful of equations.
You are looking at a black shadow (the event horizon) ringed by the photon sphere, with a warped reference grid standing in for lensed starlight and a tilted accretion disk whose near side sweeps in front of the hole.
Stylised visualisation for intuition — not a ray-traced or general-relativistic render.
What the equations say
- Mass
- 4.30 × 10⁶ M☉8.55 × 10³⁶ kg (4300000.0 M☉)
- Schwarzschild radius (Rs = 2GM/c²)
- 12.70 million km0.08 × the Earth–Sun distance · 1.27 × 10⁷ km
- Event horizon diameter (2 Rs)
- 25.40 million km
- Photon sphere (1.5 Rs)
- 19.05 million kmwhere light can orbit the hole
- ISCO (3 Rs)
- 38.09 million kminnermost stable circular orbit
- Hawking temperature
- 1.43 × 10⁻¹⁴ KT = 6.17 × 10⁻⁸ / M☉ kelvin
- Time dilation at your distance
- 0.9566√(1 − Rs/r) — time runs 4.34% slower here; 1 s near the hole lasts 1.05 s for a distant observer
- Escape velocity at your distance
- 29.13% of cc·√(Rs/r) — at the horizon it reaches light speed
- Circular orbit at your distance
- 20.60% of cperiod 4.2 hours · T = 2π·√(r³/GM)
- Hawking evaporation time
- 2.64 × 10⁴⁷ yearst ≈ 2.1 × 10⁶⁷ · (M/M☉)⁻³ years
Controls
Slider is logarithmic: 0 → 11 maps to 10⁰ … 10¹¹ solar masses.
Also logarithmic, from the Sun–Earth neighbourhood out to a light year.
Drives the disk's brightness, thickness and glow in the viewport.
Presets
Jump to a mass class. The two named objects come straight from the cosmic catalogue.