Projects
Simulating an image of a black hole
What would it look like if we could take a picture of a black hole? As it turns out, it looks like this.
In 1977, nobody knew what these objects looked like. J-P Luminet was the first to produce a simulated image of a black hole in a paper published that year:
I have no idea what kind of computer was used to produce this image, but I'm guessing Luminet used punch cards. With modern computers, how hard could it be to recreate this result? As it turns out, it's pretty tricky. Here's my effort:
Here I've recreated the stippling effect used in Luminet's original figure using d3.js. I used rejection sampling to randomly place stipples, and then relaxed them a bit by moving them toward the centers of the voronoi cells using weights based on the brightness of the original image. To make it more performant calculations are done on a web worker, but it still has a terrible impact on this page's performance. It's also not anywhere near as pretty as the original.