Visualization Techniques to To Simulate Spinning, Colliding Black Holes

The NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division’s Advanced Visualization team has successfully developed new techniques to visualize spinning, colliding black holes and the resulting flash of gravitational radiation—the work was especially challenging due to the high angular momentum of the pre-merged black holes.

NAS wrote a series of programs to “ingest” the terabytes of raw data generated using the Columbia supercomputer; experimented with texturing and shading to depict the spins across a wide range of angular speeds to maximize visual efficiency of the simulations; and used volume rendering to capture the propagating gravitational waves resulting from the collision.