A half-century old problem involving black holes has been solved using a sophisticated mathematical and computer simulation. This article summarizes the area of science research that allows theorists to develop mathematical computers models to go after complex problems, in this case in a system we will never be able to experimentally test. This work was done by Sasha Tchekhovskoy, a professor and friend of ETHS at Northwestern University, and his colleagues, who used the Blue Waters supercomputer at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Blue Waters is the world's most powerful computer at the moment.
The problem involved rotating black holes, and how materials and the accretion disk are formed and get twisted in strange ways due to the complex structure of the warping space-time around the black hole, ending up aligned with the rotating plane of the black hole. The math used to do this comes straight from Einstein's field equations in the general theory of relativity. Super cool!
