The sci-fi hit movie Interstellar has stepped out of the entertainment genre and is actually assisting in astro-physic research. In 2014 Wired magazine explained how the visual effects team behind the space blockbuster worked with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.
Together they created a new computer simulation to model how light would be dragged into the black hole Gargantua. Now, those calculations have been thoroughly researched and it was found that the software could help astrophysicists to model other celestial objects in the future.
When the special effects team started working on the simulations for the film they discovered that current technology wasn’t sufficient to scale up to IMAX resolution (23 million pixels). Thus they decided to create an entirely new simulation model called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer).
In a press release by Oliver James, chief scientist at special effects team Double Negative, stated – “To get rid of the flickering and produce realistically smooth pictures for the movie, we changed our code in a manner that has never been done before.” Instead of tracing the paths of individual rays of light, the team looked at bundles of light, which in turn created a smoother moving image then ever before seen.
A paper published in the journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity shows that the image of Gargantua (from the movie) wasn’t the most scientifically accurate one. The Gargantua’s accretion disc “” the glowing ring of matter being pulled around, above, and below the black hole “” was created at a relatively early stage, and has a fairly symmetrical design with a red tinge to the light.
However, by adding detail to the original code, scientists were able to create a more accurate image of Gargantua. The final version takes into account the vast rotational forces that would be created as the black hole spins. Not only do these forces throw matter to one side of the black hole, they also can change the color of the light for the observer (the Doppler effect).
Christopher Nolan, the director of Interstellar, really liked the first images that did not contain the Doppler shift. Oliver James said that – “We base it in science, but we always give control so that artists can change it. The first images we gave [director Christopher Nolan] didn’t have the Doppler shift, and I think he fell in love with them.”
This kind of attention to detail, from a scientific perspective, is just one of the reasons why Interstellar received such glowing reviews.
Source: TheVerge
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