A Different Perspective

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Schaller, in addition to his decades of freelance work for Astronomy and other publications, also worked on Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos television series, winning a Primetime Emmy for his visualizations. His interests in art and science have gone hand-in-hand for more than 40 years, stretching back to the mid-1970s.“I’ve been studying black holes carefully for most of my artistic career, and my interest in physics just glommed right onto that,” he says. “At that time, beginning in the early and mid ’70s […] I had already been thinking about black holes — just from my reading on the subject.”For decades, scientists have used models and their knowledge of the laws of physics to produce simulations of what a black hole might look like, in the absence of an actual picture. For example, computer simulations were invaluable to Schaller when it came to representing how gravity would warp and distort light around the event horizon of a black hole.Painting far-away cosmic objects can also entail putting some unusual queries to data-minded scientists. Michael Carroll , another frequent Astronomy art contributor, has been painting space scenes like planetary vistas and raging stars, since the early 1980s. He says that, for him, being an artist has meant asking scientists unorthodox questions. “Often, the astronomical artists asks questions of the scientists that don’t often cross their minds because they don’t think visually; they’re thinking in terms of numerical data,” he says.The resulting answers, like what colors might flow out of a black hole or how, exactly, it distorts the light that comes near the event horizon helped fill in his mind’s eye. As his understanding of black holes grew, it deepened some of the ways Carroll opted to portray them.“You begin to see that it doesn’t really suck light in, it bends the space-time continuum around itself so it bends light in,” Carroll says. This creates some interesting visual effects like faint wisps of jet material emanating in an unusual swirl pattern from the event horizon.