Spacetime Engineering Movie
Collapse of a Maxwell-Boltzman Cluster
Stuart L. Shapiro, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Saul A. Teukolsky, Cornell University
This movie depicts the collapse of a star cluster of particles to a black hole. These particles are collisionless, but interact via gravity. At the beginning of the collapse, the particle velocities are given by a relativistic Maxwell-Boltzman distribution. The expanding white shells represent spherical pulses of light emitted from the center of the cluster. Early in the simulation, the pulses escape to infinity. Eventually the pulses are trapped by the black hole growing at the center and do not escape from the black hole's event horizon.
Download Quicktime (12.3MB)
The initial radius of the cluster is 9 M. The animation begins after collapse is underway and continues until all particles are within the event horizon, at r = 2M.
last modified 3 Nov 14 by aakhan3