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Abstract

Massive, compact objects such as black holes are well known for the interesting areas of physics that come about because of them. One such phenomenon is the warping of spacetime due to their mass. Our team looked to simulate the motion of light around a black hole due to the curvature of spacetime and to visualize a variety of scenarios such as viewing objects directly behind a black hole and objects behind the viewer. By integrating a series of simple differential equations defined by General Relativity, the motion of rays of light was simulated. Once the motion of these rays of light was defined a simple backward ray tracer was implemented to color each pixel in the frame according to where the ray of light landed. Implementing these techniques allowed our team to generate sets of low-resolution images in which we were able to observe objects directly behind a black hole and directly behind an observer looking at a black hole. These images closely matched images generated by other computational models and observed gravitational lensing around galaxies.