LiveWarp2.00×T+0 sSupermassiveFPS—

Black hole mass

1.00 × 10⁷ M☉

Torn apart0

Swallowed whole0

Mass eaten0 M☉

Stars0

Debris0

Sim time0 s

PAUSED — press space

Accretion power · log—

luminosityt^−5/3 fallback lawlast 120 s

Click to drop a star · Drag to fling one · Right-drag orbit · Scroll zoom · Space pause · H hide panel

Event Horizon

A tidal disruption laboratory

Time

Time warp

Summon stars

Penetration β = r_t / r_p

Black hole

Mass · Supermassive Spin a/M Schwarzschild Charge Q/M

Event horizon r₊—

Photon orbit—

Innermost stable orbit—

Disk peak temp.—

Debris physics

Tidal bleed on approach Circularization (stream shocks) Circularization noise (turbulence) Collisions (streams merge, clouds settle) Star sweeping (stars plough through debris) Cooling (dark gas)

Look

photon orbit ISCO tidal radius

Quiescent disk glow Background stars & nebula Colour Debris cluster glow Gas clouds Gas expansion (old & far clouds thin out) Gas clumping (clouds merge over time) Gas texture (noise inside each cloud) Gas breakup (broad lobes in each cloud) Particle edge hardness (random mix)

Trails

Trail length Share of particles with trails Speed emphasis

Camera & quality

Motion blur Renderer

HDR highlight peak Render quality

What's modeled

Every pixel traces a light ray through the hole's spacetime, so the shadow, photon ring and the lensed far side of the disk come out of the geometry. Non-spinning holes, with or without charge, use the photon orbit equation directly. Spinning holes integrate the exact Kerr–Newman geodesic equations, which gives the flattened, off-centre shadow and frame dragging.
Horizon, photon orbit and ISCO are computed exactly for any spin and charge. The disk's inner edge sits at the ISCO, so a fast prograde spin pulls it close to the horizon and makes it hotter.
The disk uses a thin-disk temperature profile (T ∝ M^−1/4) with the exact redshift of an orbiting emitter: Doppler beaming plus gravitational redshift. Heavier holes run cooler.
Stars and debris orbit in a Paczyński–Wiita potential tuned so its ISCO matches the real one. Spinning holes add a Lense–Thirring (frame-dragging) force, so tilted streams precess around the spin axis.
Jets follow the Blandford–Znajek scaling: power ∝ spin² × accretion rate. They're rendered as relativistic outflows (Γ ≈ 2.5), so the jet aimed at you outshines the one aimed away. Their shape and knots are artistic.
Debris cools as it expands, faster the farther out it is, and reheats in stream shocks and the hot inner flow. Cold gas stops glowing and absorbs light instead, so outgoing streams become dark lanes across the disk and against the lensed sky. With Dust lanes on, about 18% of the debris is dust that only absorbs. Cooling rates are illustrative, not computed.
Real black holes carry essentially no charge (it would be neutralized quickly). Charge is here as the textbook Reissner–Nordström case.
Tidal radius r_t = R★(M/m★)^1/3. Above the Hills mass r_t sits inside the horizon and the star falls in whole, with no flare.
Each star's shape follows the affine star model: one deformation matrix driven by the hole's tidal field and held round by the star's own gravity, which gives way at r_t. The photosphere is drawn along that deformation; on stars large enough on screen, material visibly lifts off its stretched ends, and the star's particles become the debris at r_t.
Stars grazing 1–1.7 r_t lose mass through their L1/L2 points. Stars that cross r_t are destroyed only above a critical β (≈ 1.85 for radiative stars like the Sun, ≈ 0.9 for convective and degenerate ones; Guillochon & Ramirez-Ruiz 2013). Below it they lose their outer layers, a fraction that grows with β, and a core survives. A radiative core shrinks and can survive further passes. Convective stars swell as they lose mass, so their stripping runs away.
A disrupted star's stream gathers into a few knots under its own gravity (Coughlin & Nixon). They fall back and are torn apart again as they pass the hole. Here they are seeded from the most bound debris rather than grown by self-gravity.
The thin bleed that starts farther out (up to 3.5 r_t) is a visual early warning. Real stars shed little before about 1.7 r_t, so its strength is exaggerated.
Simplifications: on screen R_s scales as M^1/3 above 10⁵ M☉ and as M^1/6 below, so every mass fits the view. Numbers in the panel are physical, and sizes relative to R_s are true, which is why a white dwarf dwarfs a stellar-mass hole. The debris energy spread is widened so streams are visible, and stream shocks are modeled as drag. Below 10⁷ M☉ the disruption flash, gas clouds and debris cooling are rescaled to the tidal radius and its orbital time, so a disruption keeps its structure at every mass. The clock also runs faster there by the same factor (up to ~46,000× at 10 M☉), so time warp means the same on-screen pace at every mass; matter that would orbit the hole too fast to follow within a frame counts as accreted.