Black Hole Desktop & Phone Wallpapers

Supermassive Black Hole Binary Simulation

These two black holes are just 40 orbits away from merging in this simulation of the light their environment emits as they dance.

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Credit: Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Noble; simulation data, d'Ascoli et al. 2018

Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes

This image shows the warped view of a larger supermassive black hole (red) when it passes almost directly behind a companion black hole (blue) with half its mass. The gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a surreal collection of arcs.

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Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

Black Hole Accretion Disk and Corona

A black hole pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk in this illustration of a black hole named MAXI J1820+070. Above the disk is a region of superhot subatomic particles called the corona.

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Credit: Aurore Simonnet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

A Multiwavelength View of the Milky Way’s Center

The central region of our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains an exotic collection of objects, including a supermassive black hole weighing about 4 million times the mass of the Sun, clouds of gas at temperatures of millions of degrees, neutron stars and white dwarf stars tearing material from companion stars, and beautiful tendrils of radio emission. This new composite image shows Chandra data (green and blue) combined with radio data (red) from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.

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Credit: X-Ray:NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.; Radio:NRF/SARAO/MeerKAT

Black Hole Jets in Hercules A

Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A as imaged by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization

This visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole’s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance.

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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

Supercomputer Simulation Frame of a Star Distorted by a Black Hole

This frame is from a simulation of a star weighing 15 percent of our Sun's mass passing close to a black hole that weighs about 1 million Suns. The black hole’s gravity stretches and deforms the star. These simulations show that destruction and survival depend on the stars’ initial densities. Yellow represents the greatest densities, blue the least dense.

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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Taeho Ryu (MPA)

Artist’s Concept of a Gamma-ray Burst

Two neutron stars begin to merge in this artist’s concept, blasting jets of high-speed particles and producing a cloud of debris. Scientists think these kinds of events are factories for a significant portion of the universe’s heavy elements, including gold.

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Credit: A. Simonnet (Sonoma State University) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Artist’s Concept of a Runaway Black Hole

This is an artist's concept of a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes. As the black hole plows through intergalactic space it compresses tenuous gas in front of it. This precipitates the birth of hot blue stars. This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of a 200,000-light-year-long trail of stars behind an escaping black hole.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)

Dust Rings Illuminated by the Blast From the Birth of a Black Hole

The most common gamma-ray bursts signal the birth of black holes that form when the cores of massive stars collapse under their own weight. A few bursts have even enabled astronomers to probe distant dust clouds in our own galaxy. This image shows 19 of 20 dust rings detected by XMM-Newton from a gamma-ray burst first detected on October 9, 2022.

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Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/M. Rigoselli (INAF)

Surprisingly Lonely Galaxy

This image features a galaxy called 3C 297 that is lonelier than expected after it likely pulled in and absorbed its former companion galaxies. The solo galaxy is located about 9.2 billion light-years from Earth and contains a quasar, a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy that pulls in gas and drives powerful jets of matter seen in radio waves.

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Credit: x-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Torino/V. Missaglia et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI & International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Infrared: NASA/ESA/STScI; Radio: NRAO/AUI/NSF

Record-breaking Black Hole in Galaxy UHZ1

This image contains the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, a result that may explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. This discovery was made using X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red, green, and blue).

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Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

Black Hole Jets in Centaurus A

The galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) shines bright in this image combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) and IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) satellite (blue), and optical light from the European Southern Observatory in Chile (white and gray). In the center, a supermassive black hole feeds off the gas and dust encircling it, while large jets of high-energy particles and other material spew out.

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Credit: Credit: IXPE: NASA/MSFC/IXPE/S. Ehlert et al.; Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO

Artist’s Concept Comparing the Sizes of Supermassive Black Holes

This image compares the sizes of a few monster black holes that are found at the centers of galaxies. The largest one is TON 618, one of a handful of extremely distant and massive black holes for which astronomers have direct measurements. This behemoth contains more than 60 billion solar masses, and it boasts a shadow so large that a beam of light would take weeks to traverse it. The next smallest is M87 and then Cygnus A.

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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

On the Brink Wallpaper

In this wallpaper based on the movie-style poster, the viewer gets the feeling of being on a precipice, teetering just on the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. The event horizon isn’t a solid surface like Earth’s or even the Sun’s. It's the boundary where the black hole's escape velocity equals the speed of light, the speed limit of the universe. Once matter crosses the event horizon, it will never escape the black hole.

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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab