A New Way to See Inside Black Holes

Black holes exert great fascination on the public, and are also widely misunderstood in many ways. Some of these misunderstandings result from the coordinate systems that are usually used to illustrate the internal structure of black holes. Any choice of coordinates necessarily produces a distorted view, just as the choice of projection distorts a map of the Earth. The truest way to depict the properties of a black hole is through quantities that are coordinate-invariant. We have computed and plotted the independent curvature invariants of rotating, charged black holes for the first time, revealing a deep interior “landscape” that is much more beautiful and complex than usually thought. The resulting images are useful for public outreach, especially in the centennial year of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.