PHYSICS
DEPARTMENT
entrance as a shimmering sphere — just as it likely
would look in real life, Thorne said.
“Neither wormholes nor black holes have been
depicted in any Hollywood movie in the way that
they actually would appear,” Thorne said recently in
an “Interstellar” science video produced by Wired
magazine. “This is the first time the depiction began
with Einstein’s general relativity equations.
A gorgeous black hole
Much of the action in “Interstellar” revolves around
a giant black hole, which Cooper and his crewmates
call “Gargantua.” Thorne said he and the visual-effects
crew took a great deal of care to depict the lightgobbling
monster accurately.
The on-screen result is an exotic object that twists its
infilling disk of dust and gas into complex shapes, with
the overall effect further complicated by gravitational
lensing — a real astronomical phenomenon in which
a massive foreground object (such as a black hole)
warps the light emitted by stars and other bodies
located much farther away
The collaboration between Thorne and the
“Interstellar” visual-effects people was so successful
that it will extend into the scientific literature, the
physicist said.
“We’re going to write several technical papers about
this — one aimed at the astrophysics community, and
then something for the computer-graphics community
— saying, ‘Here are some things we’ve discovered
about gravitational lensing by rapidly spinning black
holes that we never knew before,’” Thorne said in the
Wired video.
THE CLAPPER 2014 - 2015
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