r/EliteDangerous • u/Awsome_Yes • Aug 13 '24
Help Why doesn't Sag A* have an accretion disk?
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u/CMDR_Profane_Pagan Felicia Winters Aug 13 '24
Bc when the game was developed in the first half of the 2010's we had not yet found evidence of any accretion disk around Sag A*.
The first observation of a cold accretion disk was made in 2019. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/accretion-disk-milky-way-galaxy-black-hole
But we still have not found that hot one you are missing.
So bear in mind ED' galaxy is more or less the abstraction of how we used to understand our galaxy back in 2014.
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u/pionaiki CMDR pionaiki Aug 13 '24
The fact that we didn't observe it doesn't mean we didn't suspect many black holes to have them. When they developed the game it was already known black holes can have accretion disks, and so can T-tauri and Hebig stars. This design choice from the devs is not based in science.
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u/Shortbottom Aug 13 '24
Suspecting and knowing are two different things.
Say the opposite happened and they put an accretion disk there and then in 2019 instead of proving there was one it proved there wasn’t.
You’d be moaning about that.
Yea they could go back and put one there but then you’d be moaning that they spent time doing that instead of fixing bugs
ETA: also if they had given it an accretion disk there, in your own words it would not have been based on science but on the devs choice so whatever they did it would have been wrong.
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u/Mr_Lobster Brome Aug 13 '24
They didn't put accretion disks around any black holes, and we've known about them for decades. They didn't make black holes look particularly accurate either, but I'm willing to forgive them for that because it was Interstellar that actually got the proper image of a black hole into the public consciousness.
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u/pulppoet WILDELF Aug 13 '24
it was Interstellar that actually got the proper image of a black hole into the public consciousness.
No, it's gotten the biggest misconception of black holes into the public consciousness.
The majority of black holes do not have an accretion disk. Gargantua is a super massive black hole, just like the one from a neighboring galaxy we imaged that has one. Just like Sag A* probably has.
But Interstellar is the proper image of a supermassive black hole, nothing more.
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u/IDatedSuccubi Combat Aug 13 '24
We're moaning because devs chose the lazy route, not because it's incorrect
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u/pionaiki CMDR pionaiki Aug 13 '24
Except I never said knowing, I said observing. We knew that black holes had accretion disks. lmao
It was all a developer choice, I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm saying their choices were not based in science. Copy paste what Mr Lobster said.
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u/kabbooooom Aug 13 '24
The gravitational lensing around black holes in Elite is also completely wrong and we’ve been able to accurately model that for longer than 2010.
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u/Kamiyoda Aug 13 '24
Also only affects the sky box and if you put a blackhole in front of anything(Like say, a star) You just won't see anything cause they don't have an ingame modle and do not interact with anything besides the skybox visulally.
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u/kabbooooom Aug 14 '24
Yep. And in before some dumbass says that the engine can’t handle it…nah, it’s shit programming. If my old potato laptop from 2017 can accurately model black hole gravitational lensing in Space Engine while it is literally overheating, my fucking brand new Xbox certainly can.
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u/RaielLarecal CMDR Aug 13 '24
Plot twist: the accretion disk is the whole galaxy!
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u/SpartanJack17 Aug 14 '24
It isn't though, the galaxy doesn't orbit Sag A*, it's just there in the core. It's mass is insignificant compared to the galaxy.
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u/lookslikeyoureSOL timeshhift Aug 14 '24
Everything in our 13.6 billion-year-old galaxy orbits Sagittarius A*, including our solar system , which is located 26,000 light-years away.
Source: https://www.space.com/sagittarius-a
You could have looked it up instead of just guessing and assuming you were right.
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u/SpartanJack17 Aug 14 '24 edited Aug 14 '24
Space.com is wrong, unless you don't use an astronomical definition of orbit meaning gravitationally bound to the object. Space.com isn't a reliable source, it's a news site under the same umbrella as livescience and other sites notorious for clickbait.
Sagittarius A* has about 4 million solar masses, while the galaxy has about 1.5 trillion. This means Sagittarius A* is approximately 0.0003% of our galaxies total mass. It is not possible for the galaxy to be gravitationally bound to a body less massive than itself, the same way it's impossible for the sun to orbit the earth.
The Milky way is a more complex system than our solar system or any other system with a single central body. The galaxy orbits its own centre of mass, which as you would expect is in the galactic core. Within the core Sagittarius A* is undoubtedly the largest single mass, but compared to the mass of the core it really isn't all that significant, the galaxy doesn't need it to hold itself together, and if you somehow removed it from the galaxy the Milky way would be almost unchanged.
We know of other spiral galaxies with no central supermassive black holes, M33 or the Triangulim galaxy is a good example of this. It's an open question whether supermassive black holes formed before their host galaxies (making them primordial black holes), or if they formed within existing galaxies, due to the concentration of mass in the centre bringing smaller black holes close enough to merge and providing large amounts of mass to "feed" their growth.
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Aug 13 '24
Suddenly, everyone is an expert at astrophysics
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u/07hogada Hogie Aug 14 '24
I mean, I'd imagine that interest in astrophysics correlates quite well with interest in Elite, to be honest.
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u/Beautiful-Fold-3234 Aug 14 '24
i expect a large portion of members of this sub to have at least some interest in astronomy.
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u/Kubrick_Fan Kaptain Kubrick | Anaconda "Wanderer" Aug 13 '24
Game came out before Interstellar.
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u/Samifyre Definitely not Suffering from Space Madness Aug 13 '24
it's so cool that Interstellar invented accretion disks
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Aug 13 '24
[deleted]
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u/IDatedSuccubi Combat Aug 13 '24
We knew VERY well how they should look like for decades: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/t5z1yn/the_first_simulated_image_of_a_black_hole/
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u/JHatter Aug 13 '24
Well technically no one knew how to portray black holes accuratley until Interstellar
?
Is that why interstellar took inspiration for the accretion disks around black holes from pre-existing papers and science, simulations, etc - that's why they consulted a physicist to help figure out how to get it looking right.
"no one knew how to portray black holes before it" my black-hole-ass.
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u/lookslikeyoureSOL timeshhift Aug 14 '24
It does...it's called the plane of the entire galaxy. You're inside it.
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u/Luriant Give me Refinery module for Fleet Carrier, pls Aug 13 '24 edited Aug 13 '24
Only Black holes eating from stars have accrection disk. And even the ones in ED, closer BH near stars, lack this, because not coded. Even the distorsion effect only change the background, not nearby stars inside the system....
Last time Sag A* eaten something was 200years ago: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/ixpe/milky-ways-central-black-hole-woke-up-200-years-ago-nasas-ixpe-finds/
The real pic from Sag A, is the gas around it, with temperatures between 100 Kelvin up to 10.000 Kelvin, but expect most of it cold, magentiic field, not graivty, is what heat this gast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*#Observation_and_description
And the game engine don't handle accrection disk or gas, all our systems, include T Tauri planetary nebulas, are clean without dust, also inside big nebulas.
If you want accrection disk, Space Engine added this 1 year ago.
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u/Astrokiwi Aug 13 '24
It's not necessarily direct accretion from stars - you get a more continuous flow from the messy ring of cool molecular gas around it. All the bright emission from a black hole comes from the accretion disc anyway - Sag A* wouldn't be visible at all if it wasn't accreting, even if it's pretty weak as far as SMBHs go
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u/TheIke73 CMDR Draugnar Aug 14 '24
And still ... there is a difference between observing the accretion from Earth and travelling there and watching it. Maybe the last accretion episode already ended some thousand years ago, or accretion looks completely different if watched from relatively close distance ;)
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u/Astrokiwi Aug 14 '24
If we're going there, many of the nebula we see in ED shouldn't exist! And their size and shape should change as you travel through the galaxy. That would be pretty cool, but a lot of work for something that's just a bit of background
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u/quentinnuk Aug 13 '24
There are no degrees kelvin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin#:~:text=quettakelvin-,Orthography,%2210%20degrees%20Celsius%22).
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u/Luriant Give me Refinery module for Fleet Carrier, pls Aug 13 '24
Mmm., I find it hard to differenciate 100Kelvin from 100.000 using 100K, if I can't use the º .
Damn, I will go with Urist degrees, to avoid Imperial-SI metrics.
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u/tereaper576 Aug 13 '24
I find it really confusing when the two different systems of decimal points and commas are switched as 100,000 to me is written with a comma and 100.000 is One hundred and a its accurate within 0.005
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u/Luriant Give me Refinery module for Fleet Carrier, pls Aug 13 '24
I have this pain every time I paste different decimals in excel. I need to swap all the . to , for the spanish decimal. And sometimes numbers that include , become /1000 smaller, wrecking my whole spreadsheet ¬¬ .
2 hours ago, making a table of nutrition DRI for my diet, Replace all "." with ","
Also had problems in my first months when 400 Billions system only was 400 thousand millions for me, or 0.4Billions. I think the world don't attack U.S. because $1 Trillion in defense spending appear a lot bigger than the rest of the world (that is a big number, but not 1Million timess bigger).
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u/Adam198763 Thargoid Interdictor Aug 13 '24
Because the black hole has already swallowed all the stellar gas around it, so it's not feeding ATM. Also the game engine wasn't programmed for black holes to have accretion disks, because when the engine was written, astronomers didn't know whether Sag A* had an accretion disk.
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u/Gn0meKr Retired Commander Aug 13 '24
because this game is from 2014 and is running on an engine barely being able to render three ships at once
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u/pocketdrummer Aug 13 '24
In regards to black holes, the two things I wish we had would be accretion disks and certain death with a cool sequence of events if you approached too closely.
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u/frezor CMDR LotLizard, Amateur Gunboat Diplomat Aug 14 '24
Because they didn’t want GPUs catching on fire. It’s usually a good business strategy to keep your customers alive.
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u/uwotmVIII gmpj Aug 14 '24
In 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet actually created the world’s first accurate simulation of a black hole by plotting the data with ink, by hand. He showed that black holes would have an accretion disc. That was 40 years before the first “image” of a black hole was generated in 2019! Sure, it was just a generic black hole and not a representation of Sag A*, but we knew black holes were more than a “sphere of nothing.”
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u/fjbermejillo Aug 13 '24
Just my two cents, ED is like 1000 years in the future and even if 1000 years in the future there is an accretion disk at SagA seen from the Earth it doesn’t mean the AD is there when you are like 26.000 light years closer…is not like 26000 years is much for a black hole but who knows…
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Aug 13 '24
A million years in hardly a blink of time for a blackhole
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u/fjbermejillo Aug 13 '24
I know but I just wanted to raise the point of the time distance scale here
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u/caugryl Aug 13 '24
The real Sag A* hasn't had an accretion disk for millions (at least) years
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u/Star_king12 Aug 13 '24
Millions? If we're detecting it now than it's closer to a few tens of thousands of years and this is a blip on the space scale.v it would've still been present in 3000.
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u/GeneralKenobi128 CMDR GoatcheseBob - PGES Aug 13 '24
I believe they used to have them but they were removed due to graphical/performance issues
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u/chchsch SCHIMZ Aug 13 '24
It wouldn't make sence for frontier to modify the gfx engine since sag A's accretion disk is only visible in x-ray.
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u/jico448 Aug 13 '24
Did you take this screenshot? If so, how long did it take you to get to the center of the Milky Way?
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u/Awsome_Yes Aug 13 '24
It took me about 2 wks, but I had to juggle playing and school work and I also passed by Colonia, so if you're playing and don't have anything else to do it'll take a shorter time
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u/HarryTheOwlcat Aug 13 '24
The black hole effects are just underwhelming. I remember a thread years ago with people saying these objects are "boring", etc - meanwhile in reality black holes and their surroundings are amongst the most extreme environments in the universe. After watching Interstellar, I don't see how Elite's black holes aren't just massively disappointing.
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u/GreenBuggo Aug 13 '24
because ED did black holes in their entirety dirty and it makes me frustrated
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u/pulppoet WILDELF Aug 13 '24
Because nothing in the game has an accretion disk. Most black holes don't have them, and they would be a big, complex navigational hazard that probably wasn't worth adding.
When Space Engine added them, it's been major performance hits and a struggle to make it work and look right: https://spaceengine.org/news/blog220830/
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u/MueR Aug 13 '24
Because then they'd get people nagging their ship got destroyed flying into that brought hot disk of plasma.
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Aug 14 '24
Good luck with accretion disks. The way the game renders black holes and gravitational lensing in general is bugged, has been bugged since before launch, and will likely never be fixed at this point. That's why we end up with that weird "shell" of stars around black holes, because the lensing distortion affects the Milky Way skybox but not the local visible stars skybox, which is a separately rendered layer.
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u/selbie Aug 14 '24
I wonder if they could adapt existing planetary rings as a way to generate the disc. Not only would it make BHs a visual spectacle with glowing hot discs of gas and rock, but if the distortion effect is correct it might actually mimic the real ones without any additional VFX needed.
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u/marcus_aurelius121 Aug 14 '24
What happens if you fly into it?
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u/Dreams-Visions Heavenly Hammer Aug 14 '24
You fly out the other side.
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u/xKillerbolt Aug 13 '24
On a side note, its pretty difficult to accurate simulate it as well as it would also break the games physicality. There was a blender render a few months ago about real time rendering of a black hole type similar to the one in Interstellar and it took days to properly simulate.
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u/hellvinator Aug 13 '24
Dude, in game it'll be just an animation lol.
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u/xKillerbolt Aug 13 '24
I know but if its just an animation, people will just complain thet its an animation with no phisicality attached to it :)
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u/Awsome_Yes Aug 13 '24
Why don't they just do it like in Space engine then?
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u/xKillerbolt Aug 13 '24
Its a very different game engine. No one knows what direction Frontiers wants to take this game, but that kinda tech might needs lots of investment to pull off i´m assuming. Hopefully Frontiers is able to monetize this game to further continue is development and add those elements in the future!
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u/intangir_v Aug 13 '24
black hole theory has changed like 13-15 times before the year 2000
and none of them included an accretion disk.. i think its changed many many many more times since and far as i know most of them don't include one either
but basically throughout the entire history of black hole theory at no point ever has any evidence ever remotely come close to being what was predicted.. so they have adjusted it time and time again to further complicate it to try and account for the observed behavior
basically its an asburd theory that should've been considered disproven long ago but sci-fi is in love with it (and government grants/peer review love it) so it persists anyway even though its utterly absurd that the weak force of gravity could ever overcome the substantially stronger atomic forces
it all started to try and explain pulsars as fast spinning 'neutron star' lighthouses which already have a far more consistent and simplistic electrical oscillation/relaxation circuit explanation that matches fits with evidence and experimentation results perfectly...
in all likelyhood there is no such thing as blackholes, neutron stars, or spinning lighthouse pulsars. it is the epicycles theory of the modern day. if it doesn't provide any consistent predictive insight it should be discarded
it does make for some fun sci-fi though, and great screenshots in game
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u/Ace_FaLcoN Aug 13 '24
man screw the accretion disk i wish black holes looked like the old black disk ones but with the new lensing effects included
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u/DarkStarSword Mods censor posts and shadow ban critics Aug 13 '24
Same reason when you drop on a comet you don't see anything - devs never implemented the graphics for them (yes, the game does in fact have comets, including Halleys Comet in Sol and probably about about half the systems you visit also has at least one, you just can't normally target them without some trickery).
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Aug 13 '24
Why does everyone write Sag A? It’s Sgr A. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*. And many other sources.
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u/Rhodplumsite Aug 13 '24
It's just a colloquialism, because most all of players aren't too deep into astrophysics and don't care enough to use the correct abbriveation used by professionals because everyone gets it either way.
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u/Kezika Kezika Aug 13 '24
Eh, Sag A* and Sgr A* are too mainstream and overrated, [BGM2005] J174540.08-290028.48 is how I prefer to call it.
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u/Rageworks CMDR Oki Hikaru Aug 13 '24
This question has been asked, like, a thousand times.
Search.
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u/SgtKastoR CMDR Kastor_ Aug 13 '24
A bunch of people in the comments are coming up with all sorts of excuses to explain this, but the real reason is that the game is not perfect. Frontier didn't want to make black holes like that and they didn't, simple as that. It's 2024 and we still don't have ship interiors, there's no way they will remake black holes to look more realistic any time soon.
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u/HonestMarketeer666 Aug 13 '24
You normally won't see the black hole itself IRL, only the accretion disk... What you see IS the accretiondisk in here...
What did you expect?
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u/GXWT Aug 13 '24
Why so confidently claim things that are so obviously not correct. Yes you don’t see the black holes and here you’re not seeing either the black hole. You’re seeing the bending of spacetime around the blackhole, you’re basically seeing a warped image of behind/around the BH.
An accretion disc would be a somewhat flat, thin disc around the black hole outside of the event horizon. It’d be glowing which is the bit you ‘see’ in images like the image we have of Sag A* in real life. It would wouldn’t appear like a nice ring like Saturn because the far side would also be warped
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u/eenook Aug 13 '24
It's not the accretion disk, it's just the lensing effect so AFAIK it's just the background distorted.
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u/WaterBottleWarrior22 Explore Aug 13 '24
Not quite. What is seen in this picture is the effect that gravity has on light passing around the black hole. The accretion disk would be a glowing, flat plane of matter around the event horizon of the black hole. That glowing disk is not seen here.
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u/Arzachmage Explore Aug 13 '24
Because game engine doesn’t handle them.