Interstellar black hole movie#

This both creates and obliterates images of stars, creating up to 13 images of a star as the caustic flings images out of the black hole. They began to use the code to conduct simulations of how a weird space surface called a “caustic” might affect images of star fields near black holes in a process known as “gravitational lensing.” Their simulations showed that as caustics are dragged around the sky by the spinning force of a black hole, they stretch around the hole again and again, affecting how stars look. “Instead of tracing the paths of individual light rays using Einstein’s equations -one per pixel-we traced the distorted paths and shapes of light beams.” That led to a new set of code they called DNGR-the Double Negative Gravitational Renderer.īut the team soon realized that the images produced using DNGR code could be used for much more than a fictitious interstellar trip. “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,” Oliver James, chief scientist at visual effects firm Double Negative, said in a release. So the team turned to physics to create something different. When they began to construct images of a black hole within an accretion disk, they realized that existing visual effects technology wouldn’t cut it-it created a flickering effect that would have looked bad in IMAX theaters.

Interstellar black hole movie#

But the methods created by the film’s Oscar-nominated visual effects team may have more serious applications than wowing movie audiences-they could actually be useful to scientists, too. A new paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity tells how the Interstellar team turned science fiction towards the service of scientific fact and produced a whole new picture of what it might look like to orbit around a spinning black hole.ĭirector Christopher Nolan and executive producer (and theoretical physicist) Kip Thorne wanted to create a visual experience that was immersive and credible. Much has been made of the mind-bending visual effects in Interstellar.