NASA shares animated video of black hole formation

What does it look like when two stars merge, eating each other alive and forming a black hole?

According to scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center -- and the supercomputer there that helped run advanced models on the behavior of colliding stars in deep space -- it looks like this.

The video above, released today by NASA, offers a simulation of the "coalescence of unmagnetized binary neutron stars." As the two-minute animation shows, upon collision, the two stars merge, collapse and form a black hole. Specifically, the collision is of two unmagnetized stars, one bigger than the other -- or in science-speak, "with various mass ratios."

As NASA explains in its description of the star collision: "At 13 milliseconds, the more massive star has accumulated too much mass to support it against gravity and collapses, and a new black hole is born."

The black hole eats most of the two stars, but not all. Some of the less dense, faster moving star dust remains un-swallowed and, instead, for a large and rapidly rotating "torus."

In a paper accompanying the new video, scientists at NASA acknowledge that: "Although complete and accurate, our results are also far from being realistic."

As always, further research is needed.