Physics Commons^™

Computing An Image Of Objects Hiding Behind A Black Hole, Shannon Harding

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Gravitational lensing is the bending of light rays around a black hole. The goal of this project was to produce a computer code that would model light rays coming from a grid of objects set behind a rotating black hole. Using these light rays, we produced an image illustrating how this background of objects would appear to an observer on Earth. This was done by creating a MATLAB code to model the paths of multiple light rays at a time. This code was then used to help check and correct a C++ code that produced an image. Over the semester, …