In a historic feat of mankind, scientists captured the first image of a black hole in 2019 piercing through space to reach the heart of the massive galaxy Messier 87 where the supermassive black hole, M87* lies. Located about 55 million light-years away from Earth, the image of the black hole has created history, but it was not similar to Christopher Nolan’s depiction of the epic visual of the same.
Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Kip Thorne was assigned to formulate the near-perfect visual of a black hole. Interestingly, the general mass did not have any idea of how the monstrous space giant was supposed to look. Surprisingly, Nolan and Thorne, with the visual effects team, created the astounding near-accurate black hole before the image of M87* was released.
Kip Thorne Explained Interstellar Black Hole, Gargantua With Reality
Christopher Nolan was keen on creating a visual narrative with scientific accuracy in his space odyssey, Interstellar. While most of the imagery was aesthetically pleasing, the fictional supermassive black hole Gargantua— 100 million times the mass of our Sun— has fascinated fans and scientific minds. It was not just the visual aesthetics but the scientific accuracy that was perplexing to any curious mind. Kip Thorne, the mind behind the black hole, explained the reason behind the reel vs. the real black hole.
“The camera for the movie Interstellar is near the plane of the disc and so that’s what it looks like an interstellar but we’re going to move the camera up to the North Pole and see what happens. It’s pretty obvious, you lose the crossbar and then you blur things out because the radio astronomers don’t have very good angular resolution,” Throne said in his lecture at Cardiff University.
It was never easy to create the visual masterpiece of a space monument centering the climax of the movie without compromising its elegance. Thorne took up the challenge and met with Nolan’s astounding vision to create one of the greatest movie marvels in history.
Christopher Nolan On The Science Behind Interstellar Meeting the Visual Narrative
Interstellar is all about science, or sometimes bending it for the essence of the narrative’s demand. Throne who has served as the science advisor to Nolan’s grand sci-fi epic attempted to make the movie closer to scientific accuracy. “There were occasional moments with Kip,” he told BBC News, “Where I would sort of say look we really have to find a way to make you know this happen,” he continued.
“He would go away and do calculations and find ways that could accommodate both the demands of the story and also real physics. Particularly with regard to things like time dilation, you know? I would sort of tell them, ‘Okay well this is what I think works for the story in terms of the differential between the time the astronauts are experiencing’ and the people back on Earth say, ‘Well this is what I think is dramatic if you can find a way to make that work and here would do a lot of calculations and use his great knowledge and figure out how that would be possible.’”
Nolan further added that Thorne has astounding information about how the universe works. His insights into the creative process of the movie as a collaborator have justified the narrative. Nolan did not shy away from admitting that without Throne’s immaculate insight in the making of the movie, Interstellar would not be possible with such finer details.
Interstellar is available to stream on Prime Video, MGM+, and Paramount+.
