Visual representation of black holes?

[subn3t]

Given how much attention to detail there has been in ED with things like stars, I was a little underwhelmed by the visual representation of black holes - perhaps the most mysterious and interesting stellar objects.

If you do a search on YouTube for black holes in ED, they currently look like very faint spherical distortions in space. There's no event horizon or accretion disk:

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For those of you who have seen Interstellar, Kip Thorne, arguably the world's foremost authority on black holes, was brought on as a science consultant. This is what he came up with:



Also, these links detail the creation of the black hole in Interstellar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yxaUi8LIzE
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/

At any rate, I have absolutely zero qualification to discuss the finer points of the nature of black holes, but does Frontier really need an excuse to put something this cool-looking into Elite: Dangerous?

 

[ARZUMATA]

Could be some graphics limitations? But yeah, something like that... would be awesome.

 

[Rubbernuke]

No-one really knows what they look like or how they behave, so they could be low key as in ED (if nothing is falling into them and being shredded (like the glowy bits with Interstellar)).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole is a good read.

 

[Lobstris]

Aside from black holes it would also be nice to see accretion disks about stars, rapidly spinning oblate spheroid stars (e.g. Achenar), contact binaries/common envelopes with distorted shape, lots more small moons round gas giants, plus cometary and Oort cloud-esque bodies. Here's to the future...

 

[Tomash]

This thread +1 so much, I love ED for accurate representation of milky way -- now what would be awesome is also a more accurate representation of the actual celestial bodies (stars, comets, black holes, distant quasars and supernovas).

 

[kamenjar]

At any rate, I have absolutely zero qualification to discuss the finer points of the nature of black holes..

I have even less, but I would suspect that there are "lone" and old black holes that are done sucking up material and have no accretion disks or any visible matter around them. Younger and super-massive black holes will likely have them.

 

[NanoAnarchy]

I agree the black holes could use some flair, only ss's i've seen of them are all lackluster.