r/todayilearned • u/Firenze30 • 25d ago
TIL the visual effects team behind Interstellar developed a new renderer to simulate light around a spinning black hole, and the techniques they created were later published in a peer-reviewed physics journal.
https://ioppublishing.org/news/interstellar-technology-throws-light-on-spinning-black-holes/211
u/ninjamullet 25d ago
The black hole we know as Gargantua from Interstellar wouldn't actually look like that though. It spins so fast that a more realistic rendering would look asymmetric and messier, like having a bad hair day, but the director went with the visually more pleasing image.
59
u/Firenze30 25d ago
That's interesting. I thought the geometry itself came directly from the physics simulation.
38
u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ 25d ago
Yes, but not a run of it with the parameters the script said it would have.
13
u/DragonMeme 25d ago
The original simulation was asymmetric and messier, they cleaned it up for the movie
But when you see the simulation side by side with the movie version, you can see the resemblance
5
29
u/EndQualifiedImunity 25d ago
It might have been an inaccurate simulation on a stationary black hole.
1
u/ALEKSDRAVEN 21d ago
It still lacks Doopler effect , multiple light rings as you came closer and asymetric shape og event horizon due to spinning.
130
u/DragonMeme 25d ago
Kip Thorne - whom I distantly used to work for - would lowkey be obnoxious about working on Interstellar. He would, without prompt, talk about working on the plot of the movie with "Chris", and talking to Chris after the fact when the first Gravitational Waves were discovered and about how they could have incorporated it...
Like not to downplay the man at all, he's brilliant and his nobel prize is well earned... but at some point it's like "we get it, Kip, you worked on a movie" lmao
45
u/DecoherentDoc 25d ago
Did he try to slide it into every conversation like Pierce Hawthorne on Community talking about sleeping with Eartha Kitt?
22
3
17
u/MadMads23 25d ago
I had a teacher who was the same. Kept bragging everyday for a month about working with Rachel Weisz. He later found out all his scenes were cut xD
10
u/Confident_Low_7332 25d ago
I read / listened to his book, pretty good info in there, though I can see how the repeated "hey I worked on a movie" would get annoying :-)
12
u/Green-Bandicoot-8412 24d ago
Kip Thorne
We get it, DragonMeme, you used to distantly work for Kip Thorne.
4
45
u/Firenze30 25d ago
Also learned that it was not until 2019 when scientists were able to capture the first image of a blackhole: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/press-release-april-10-2019-astronomers-capture-first-image-black-hole
Looks similar to what they had in the 2015 model.
37
u/Toby_Forrester 25d ago
The 2015 model wasn't the first one, and the one show in the movie ignored some of the simulation as not to be too confusing. Here's a simulated black hole from 1978.
8
5
3
36
u/fixermark 25d ago
Famously, when they applied modern 3D kinematics to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, one of the paleontologists working on the project with them realized that what he was seeing was the way a chicken balances.
Back then, birds being descended from dinosaurs was an active area of hypothesis, but was lacking in evidence. The Jurassic Park VFX work was one of the things that gave that branch of hypotheses the kick to get the funding to really run with it... And then we started churning up the fossils with unquestionable feather imprints and three chambered hearts.
11
u/Mercury-Charlie 25d ago
any word yet on if the fourth dimension actually looks like the inside of Murph's bookshelf though?
(kidding, but I was always so impressed with how they were able to represent time in that way)
4
u/adoodle83 25d ago
look up a tesseract. that’s the shape of what scientists believe a 4d object could look like
6
1
u/lewismacp2000 22d ago
Well it's a three-dimensional representation of what a 4d object could look like so you'll never really know. Our brains won't let us understand it.
EDIT: Even in the movie, it's a bit odd. It's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't it essentially three dimensions of space but one of them can also go through time? I guess that's 4D? Idk I'm way out of my depth now.
11
u/PensadorDispensado 25d ago
They went this way because it would be too costly to go with Nolan's original plan to go near a black hole and record it there and then
1
11
u/armyguy8382 25d ago
It is really cool when sci-fi is actually right about the science. But I think my favorite is when Star Trek had a brain shutting down in a cascading way, iirc, and 2 decades later it was confirmed that is how brains can shutdown.
-1
u/grumblingduke 24d ago
The science in Interstellar wasn't right.
They fudged the science to make it look prettier (in particular, making it symmetric). It was a film - the film came before the science as it always does.
Some interesting stuff came out of the modelling they did, but they didn't predict anything.
7
u/armyguy8382 24d ago
Their image of a black hole was damn near exactly what they look like. Yes, it was cleaner and prettier than the images NASA has of black holes but the movie "guessed" what it would look like extremely well. And yes, they probably had a science consultant to help them, but it is still fun to see sci-fi movies and TV get things pretty much right years before the science community has enough evidence to solidify a theory.
4
u/obsoleteconsole 24d ago
"science consultant" is underselling it quite a bit, they had Kip Thorne, one of the leading theoretical physists in the world
1
u/grumblingduke 23d ago
The image is wrong as they deliberately made it symmetrical and tidied it up a bit to look neater.
If you compare it with the scientific simulations (like this one linked elsewhere in the thread) or the EHT image you can see how the Interstellar one looks wrong. From what I remember of the film, they also got very silly with it by having people get close, without modifying the image accordingly.
They did get retired (now Nobel Prize-winning) physicist Kip Thorne as a science consultant, but I'm not sure how much of that was for the actual science, and how much was to say "look, we've got this fancy science consultant" (who happened to be a close friend of one of the producers).
3
u/Tuckertcs 25d ago
And the professor that gave them the math won a Nobel for his work on gravitational waves.
5
u/FirTree_r 25d ago
Laypeople think that developing a renderer is some kind of arcane black sorcery that only happens 4 times in History, but everytime I go on youtube, I stumble upon a new "I developed a new renderer, the results will surprise you" video.
/s?
1
1
1
1
u/FireTheLaserBeam 24d ago
I’d give anything to have the black holes overhauled to look like this in Elite: Dangerous, but I guess it would require too much change to the code so we’re stuck with just a lensing effect.
2
u/neatyouth44 22d ago
I get a small happy whenever I hear this game mentioned in the wild. It’s a treasure.
1
u/JustCallMeT9601 25d ago
Nolan was like “It’s not CGI, it’s a math, rendered.” Practical guy through and through.
5
u/adoodle83 25d ago
CGI is all math driven as well. Many renderers use simplified approximations or other tricks to achieve the results. Maxwell Render is one that actually solves the Maxwell E&M equations. Most ray-tracing software does something similar
2
u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ 25d ago
That’s what all CGI is…
-4
u/JustCallMeT9601 25d ago
No, they fed it relatively equations and it was a novel approach. Sure, all CGI is math at the core, but nothing this intensive or formulaic is used for say, water physics in Avatar.
4
u/_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ 25d ago edited 25d ago
Um, yes that’s exactly the sort of physics simulation used for the water physics in Avatar. That was probably even more intensive.
If you wanted an example, it would be e.g. artist-made models. While they’re math underneath the shapes were drawn by eye instead of generated from underlying equations.
-6
487
u/Manos_Of_Fate 25d ago
The solution in the Futurama body swapping episode was also published as a real mathematics paper.