Inside Silke Weinfurtner’s laboratory at the University of Nottingham in the UK, a large water tank helps her staff higher perceive the complexity of the universe by standing in as an analogue for black holes.
By introducing waves right into a liquid and making a vortex at the centre, the staff mimics a few of the interactions that happen in black holes. “We generate this effective gravitational field through a fluid flow,” says Weinfurtner. As the waves work together with the vortex, their path turns into deformed into co-rotating and counter-rotating waves, just like the path our bodies take as they swirl right into a black hole. “They’re sort of acting like light,” says Weinfurtner. “We can perform these super radiance experiments, and we can see exactly how light and waves really play with the black hole.”
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