Interactive gravity
Six small animations to explain black-hole physics visually: ringdown, accretion, lensing, spacetime distortion, binary coalescence and interactive perturbations.
A perturbed black hole relaxes like a struck bell. The shadow is deformed in a quadrupolar pattern and the deformation decays with the Schwarzschild fundamental-mode ratio ωR/ωI ≈ 4.2.
The inclined disk is brighter on the approaching side and dimmer on the receding side. It is not a full ray-traced simulation, but it captures the basic visual idea behind Doppler boosting.
Background stars are displaced and stretched around the shadow, hinting at primary and secondary images near an Einstein ring.
A WebGL fragment shader bends a texture as if the black hole were distorting the light from the page itself. Move the cursor over the panel to drag the lens.
Two compact objects inspiral, merge and leave behind a ringing remnant. The strain strip below the animation changes from a chirp to a damped sinusoid.
Use the cursor as a passing star. Moving close to the hole or clicking on the panel excites a damped quadrupolar oscillation and launches gravitational-wave ripples.