#INTERSTELLAR BLACKHOLE MOVIE#

Our eyes are sensitive to visual wavelengths, from 380 nanometers (violet) to 740 nanometers (red), and movies are very much based on what humans can see (I hear infrared movies are rubbish). Gargantua was created with human vision in mind. Remember what we will see with seeing is *not* the accretion disk! Check out the 'varying wavelength' simulation by Chi-Kwan Chan, which shows nicely how the accretion disk disappears at mm wavelengths, enabling us to see the shadow.

Chiara Mingarelli, of the Flatiron Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA), who’s tweet inspired this article: Over to gravitational wave astrophysicist Dr. Broderick is a professor at the Perimeter Institute and University of Waterloo, and a member of the EHT collaboration. Short answer: no, it should look something like this: Screen capture from Avery Broderick’s 2015 Convergence presentation on the theoretical efforts behind the EHT. Sure, there’s going to be differences based on mass, jets of material, size of accretion disks and other details, but will the EHT first image bear any resemblance to the Interstellar rendering? As this CGI beauty is based on real physics theory, and assuming the first EHT image doesn’t throw the fidelity of general relativity into doubt, both Gargantua and the two EHT targets should, basically, look the same. They are also two wonderful targets to study, as both are very different in nature. This means that both Sgr A* and M87 will appear approximately the same size in the sky to the EHT. In a wonderful stroke of cosmic luck, although M87 is 50 million light-years away, some 2,000 times further away than Sgr A*, it’s also approximately 2,000 times more massive. But M87’s monster dwarfs our comparatively diminutive specimen - it’s a super-heavyweight among supermassive black holes, with a mass of a whopping 6.5 billion Suns. With a mass of four million Suns, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole is called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short) and is located approximately 25,000 light-years away. The EHT currently has two targets it hopes to image, the supermassive black hole in the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and one inside the massive elliptical galaxy, M87. Black holes are the most extreme gravitational objects in the universe and the supermassive monsters that lurk in the cores of most galaxies are true behemoths.

The EHT is a global network of radio telescopes all dedicated to probing the final frontier of general relativity. Physics heavyweight Kip Thorne even advised on how this rotating black hole - a supermassive one at that - should look and behave, based on earlier work by Jean-Pierre Luminet ( ScienceAlert has a great article about this).īack to reality, the EHT may well be presenting its own “Gargantua moment” tomorrow when the first results are presented. Interstellar’s black hole, called “Gargantua,” is a sight to behold and many physicists and CGI experts went out of their way to base that thing on the physics that is predicted to drive these monsters. Diving into a black hole has never been so much fun

#INTERSTELLAR BLACKHOLE MOVIE#

We may actually see what a black hole - more precisely, a black hole’s event horizon - really looks like.īut we already know what a black hole looks like, right? There have been countless science fiction imaginings of black holes over the years and, most recently, the Matthew McConaughey movie “Interstellar” depicted what is touted as the most scientifically-accurate sci-fi black hole ever. Further details as to what this result actually is are under wraps, but as the EHT’s mission is to image a supermassive black hole for the first time, the expectation is that it will be a historic day for humanity. Tomorrow, on April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will make an international announcement about a “groundbreaking result” from the global collaboration. UPDATE: The EHT’s first image has been released! See: This Is the First Image of a Black Hole The supermassive black hole “Gargantua” from the movie “Interstellar.”

Interstellar blackhole