2014-2015 | Page 50

A few quibbles In the movie, however, Cooper and his crew spend some time in close proximity to the black hole, which strains credulity. The astronauts would likely be killed by the energetic radiation thrown off by the superhot disk of material circling Gargantua, Roberto Trotta, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London, noted in an article for the British newspaper The Guardian. Or they’d be “spaghettified” by the intense gravitational pull, which would be much stronger at one end of their bodies than the other, Trotta added. And that’s not the only issue. The astronauts land on a world that orbits very close to Gargantua — so close that, as the film depicts it, for every hour spent on the exoplanet’s surface, seven years elapse on Earth. Such “time dilation” In fact, a planet so close to a black hole could not even exist, Trotta observed: Tidal forces generated by the black hole’s immense gravity would tear the planet apart. A visual spectacle Such details will rankle some filmgoers, while other folks won’t mind suspending their disbelief. But most people who see “Interstellar” will probably agree that it’s a stunning visual spectacle. One of the alien planets depicted in the film, for example, is a water world featuring mysterious gigantic waves, while another is a frigid realm whose clouds are frozen solid. These worlds are gorgeously rendered, as are the many spaceflight sequences throughout the movie. The spaceships in “Interstellar” are also nicely conceived and designed. Endurance is a ring-shaped vehicle consisting of 12 boxy modules, some of which can be shuttled to the surface of an exoplanet to set up a base. The mothership carries two heavy-lift “landers” to perform this work, as well as two moreagile “Rangers,” which the crew uses for planetary exploration. And Endurance rotates 5.6 times per minute to generate Earth-equivalent gravity aboard the ship — a detail the sticklers in the audience will doubtless appreciate. does indeed occur in the presence of gravitational fields, but there’s no way it could be so extreme, according to Trotta. “You would need such a strong gravitational field that you need to be close to what is called the Schwarzschild radius of the object — essentially the event horizon of a black hole,” he wrote in The Guardian. (The event horizon is the point beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole’s clutches.) “There is simply no planet that can have this kind of gravity, and if you tried to land on the surface, it would be so strong it would crush you. The numbers simply do not work.” THE CLAPPER 2014 - 2015 50 Read more at: http://www.space.com/27701-interstellar-moviescience-black-holes.html