Blender files to produce visualization of star orbiting a black hole

Read full text
Authors: Pablo Marchant
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Blender files to reproduce an artistic impression of a star orbiting a black hole. This is not sourced out of a real simulation, it is meant to be an example that encompasses important aspects of such a system. Background stars are just individual light sources placed far away. Black hole size is far too gigantic but doing it realistically would make it invisible in this scale, and the lensing effect is produced by playing games with a transparent sphere with a weird refraction index. "Oscilations" of the star are constructed from random noise. But idea here is to highlight some important aspects in such a system. Physical shape of the star is taken from the Roche potential of a binary, and it can be procedurally adjusted to different mass ratios and filling factors. Edges of the star are darkened, as expected. And the "eclipse" produced by the black hole is expected to slightly brighten the source. If you find this useful or make some derivative work let me know!

Fields of Study & Subjects

Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques Stellar planetary and galactic studies

Publication details

Journal / source
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Publication date
4 March 2026
Language
EN