Black Hole Simulator: TON 618

Orbit a supermassive black hole, rendered live by your phone's GPU.

This is not a video. Every frame traces light through curved spacetime — the Schwarzschild geodesics of a non-rotating black hole — so what you see is what the physics predicts: the accretion disk bent up and over the horizon, the thin photon ring where light circles forever, and the far side of the disk lensed into view above and below the shadow.

Inspired by TON 618, one of the most massive black holes known.


EXPLORE

Drag to orbit. Pinch to fly closer or pull back. Double-tap to reset.
Three framings — Orbit, Edge-on, and Above — or find your own angle.
Tilt your phone and the view answers with a subtle parallax.


TWO LOOKS

Realistic renders light the way physics bends it — Doppler-brightened on the approaching side, dimmed on the receding side, with bloom where the disk glows hottest.
Anime paints the same geodesics in flat cel bands and violet ink.


SEE SPACETIME CURVE

Turn on the grid and watch space itself dip toward the horizon, the classic rubber-sheet picture drawn around a real ray-traced black hole.


TUNED FOR YOUR DEVICE

Three quality tiers — Raw, Medium, and Ultra — trade resolution and integration steps for speed.
Automatic quality adapts to GPU load, heat, and Battery Saver so the app never turns your phone into a hand-warmer.
An FPS readout if you like to know.


LEARN

About TON 618: how heavy it is, how far its light has travelled, why it was mistaken for a star.
Black Hole Facts: ten things worth knowing — the event horizon, time dilation, spaghettification, Hawking radiation, the photon sphere, and more.


SHARE

Capture any view as a still and send it anywhere.
Pause the animation to hold a moment.


QUIET BY DESIGN

An atmospheric soundtrack ("I Walk With Ghosts" by Scott Buckley, CC-BY 4.0) that follows your media volume and can be turned off.
No account, no sign-in, no subscription. The app is free; changing the picture quality shows a short ad, and Ultra quality is unlocked by watching a short video.


THE MODEL

Light paths use a non-rotating Schwarzschild model in normalized units. Disk colours, brightness and the emphasised ring are styled for clarity — an artistic visualisation, not a resolved observation of TON 618.

Recent changes:
What's new in 2.0
• Spinning black holes, plus six real ones from TON 618 to Gaia BH1
• Dive in through the event horizon and read your fall report
• Spaghettify an astronaut, rover or spacecraft
• Throw a probe into orbit, or merge two holes and hear the chirp
• Telescope view, light paths and live readouts
• A new look and new sounds