LONDON: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar may not have brought home the box office its producers would have liked, but the film’s depiction of wormholes, singularities, and other cosmic phenomena is wowing scientists.
In the current issue of Classical and Quantum Gravity, the team behind the stunning visual effects in the space thriller said that they actually made some intriguing discoveries about the nature of black holes while trying to simulate a nearby camera filming Gargantua, the black hole in Interstellar.
The payoff came with the development of computer code designed to recreate the effect of filming Gargantua at close range, according to IOP, publisher of Classical and Quantum Gravity.
“Using their code, the Interstellar team, comprising London-based visual effects company Double Negative and Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, found that when a camera is close up to a rapidly spinning black hole, peculiar surfaces in space, known as caustics, create more than a dozen images of individual stars and of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives. They found that the images are concentrated along one edge of the black hole’s shadow,” IOP explained.
In developing the movie’s visual effects, the team essentially made the first attempt ever to compute what it would look like to view a black hole from its orbit, a dizzying sight of the singularity “dragging space into a whirling motion and stretching the caustics around itself many times.” The same process was used to visualize the wormhole used by the astronauts in Interstellar to travel through space.
In the paper, Thorne and his colleagues flesh out the underpinnings of the computer code behind the effects, describing how they “mapped the paths of millions of lights beams and their evolving cross-sections as they passed through the black hole’s warped spacetime.”
The team was able to represent the swinging movement of Gargantua’s accretion disk through the black hole’s shadow, as well as the distortion caused by gravitational lensing, an effect visible to observers of a black hole which is literally bending and distorting the light from its disk and distant stars.
“This lensing happens because the black hole creates an extremely strong gravitational field, literally bending the fabric of spacetime around itself, like a bowling ball lying on a stretched out bed sheet,” IOP noted.
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