Black Hole Flight Simulator

The BHFS

All the general relativistic black hole visualizations on this website were made by me using the Black Hole Flight Simulator (BHFS).

I started doing simple black hole animations in 1996. During 1997 and 1998 I developed a website Falling into a Black Hole.

I began writing the BHFS when I had the privelege of spending the 2001/2 academic year on sabbatical with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The BHFS features:
  • Comprehensive implementation of special relativity.
  • Comprehensive realization of the complete Reissner-Nordstriöm geometry of an ideal, non-rotating, charged black hole, including the interior of the black hole and its connections via wormholes and white holes to other universes, and thence to yet other universes. The mass and charge of the black hole are arbitrarily adjustable. The BHFS does not yet implement rotating black holes (Kerr-Newman geometry), but I hope to fix that one day.
  • Full implementation of arbitrary numbers of “rigid body” objects, which by default move along geodesics. The observer is attached to one such object.
  • General relativistic volume-rendering, both outside and inside the horizon.
  • Interactive control, with mouse and keyboard, of the view, of the motion of the observer, and of numerous aspects of the scene.
  • Command line control over an internet socket connection allows total control of every aspect of the scene and flightpath.
  • Able to render to arbitrary single- or multi-piped graphics configurations.
  • HDR (High Dynamic Range) color-rendering with ILM's OpenEXR 16-bit half-float format.
  • Numerous accelerations, fast algorithms, and graphic refinements designed to achieve seamless high-quality rendering while maintaining maximum speed.


Is the BHFS available for download?

Unfortunately no, the BHFS is not publically available. I hope that one day the BHFS will become public, but that has not yet happened. The BHFS is a complex code, with more than 100,000 lines of c and c++. The BHFS is hard to use and hard to compile. It works only under linux, and it is built on SGI's OpenGL Performer, which SGI have ceased supporting.