Star Vortex

Here's another in that 1986 series of astronomical features. This one was originally meant to depict a high-powered gas jet coming from out of a black hole. But as I review it, this could just as easily be an "active galaxy" where an enormous central black hole creates intense radiation as it gobbles up stuff from just around it. This would then be the "accretion disk" or matter spinning in a vortex around the giant black hole. Or perhaps it is not that at all, but a gamma-ray burst in action, where an oversized but failing star collapses into a black hole all at once. It's a violent universe out there, as well as beautiful.

I have done stuff to this picture with Photoshop. The original 1986 acrylic did not contain the white sparkles and glows which surround the central jet. Now that we have Hubble Space Telescope, deep-sky objects have been revealed to us in much finer detail so space artists must imitate accordingly. I added the starry glows to represent incandescent gas and other superheated material orbiting around the black hole's accretion disc, before it inevitably is sucked in, on its way to...perhaps another universe.

"Star Vortex," summer 1986 acrylic on illustration board, plus Photoshop meddling in 2009, 8" x 8".