My first trip into the unknown

[Dominico]

So i decided to take my undefeated type 6 out for a cruise.
Veteran of the bd+03 blockades and scourge of sidewinder pirates never destroyed i was doing one of my eager boosts from the launchpad and painted it all over the side of the station door. I decided like they christen new ships with bottles i christened mine with a station.
So decided this was a good omen to go on a big voyage and i set out to boldly go where stupidly named people had been before (thats such an immersion wrecker but thats another thread...

Anyway was loving exploring and trying to figure which way i would go, spotting super massive stars and finding the odd random uss. Ohhh might be something cool here!! Nope just a strangely named npc cruising...

Then i spotted something so cool, double black hole system. So exciting but. . waaaaaahhh.. so disappointing.

Is this what a real black hole is like?
Caus3 i thought it was like this...


But there is just a bit of a blurring effect. Sigh...

Good news is i tried to get really close and it nearly burnt me to a crisp (shouldnt it have squashed me)

I used 3 of my 4 heatsinks escaping and had a full on panic! Nearly lost my Type 6 ex MkII for the first time outside a station.

So any science boffins confirm that black holes really are that dull in real life?

 

[Archvillain]

Yes, they really are that "dull". They're not dull. What you mistook for blur was light itself being warped around the black hole, a bit like the predator's cloaking system in "Predator", but extending out into space beyond the body. This is called Gravitational Lensing, and because of it, scientists know where to look to see - five years from now - a particular supernova explode! (The supernova is in a galaxy behind another galaxy, and the gravitational lensing of the galaxy in the middle allows us to look around the corner at the supernova. And if we look around a corner that involves more distance to the supernova, there will be a delay before it appears there. We've already seen the same supernova explode multiple times in multiple different spots in the sky.

For something more similar to your water-circling-the-drain-in-space image, some black holes have an accretion disk - when they are sucking in a lot of matter, it gets strung out and hot as it gets ripped apart as it gets closer to the event horizon. To see what this can look like, a modern accurate representation of a pretty epic accretion disk is in the movie Interstellar (screengrab below, physics discussion in the link. The black hole is in the middle of the big bright thing, the black spot is an orbiting planet in the foreground).
I don't think Elite Dangerous currently simulates accretion disks.


http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/151301/shape-of-accretion-disk-surrounding-the-black-hole-in-interstellar-film