Visualizing black holes with general relativistic ray tracing
I don't know what the right word for this is (ironic? serendipitious?), but my astonomy friend was just doing this same thing this past week with Blender:<p>"Using blender, I've taken my first steps in creating a black hole. Since blender with its ray tracing renderer doesn't allow light to bend and curve like it would through spacetime deformation, I had to incorporate refraction and a lot of lens to emulate the behavior.<p>The rays from the renderer that I'm using only know how to move in straight lines, however it can handle refraction very well. So long story short, the curvature of spacetime is replaced with a bunch of refracting elements that essentially fill the volume of a sphere. The crucial part is the index of refraction changes, inversely so, within the sphere. Result is a close enough approximation of the black hole."<p>Results looked similar to some of those in the article.