The visual effects crew behind "Interstellar's" supermassive black holes was certainly not faking it, as they are contributing to studies on the subject.
According to Space.com, the scientist filmmakers published a study on a black hole, which they named "Gargantua," in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Their knowledge of Gargantua then provided the groundwork for the wormhole central to Christopher Nolan's epic blockbuster.
"This new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists like me," study co-author Kip Thorne said in a press release. "We, too, need smooth images."
To get a more realistic on-screen black hole, the team needed to care of a certain glint that took place.
"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 light rays using Einstein's equations - one per pixel - we traced the distorted paths and shapes of light beams," study co-author Oliver James, chief scientist at Double Negative, said in the release. "Once our code, called DNGR for Double Negative Gravitational Renderer, was mature and creating the images you see in the movie Interstellar, we realized we had a tool that could easily be adapted for scientific research."
"Interstellar" has made $186,959,681 as of Feb. 12, according to Box Office Mojo, but that was only about $20 million above their production budget. Regardless, the film has generally received critical and scientific praise.
"A light beam emitted from any point on a caustic surface gets focused by the black hole into a bright cusp of light at a given point," James said. "All of the caustics, except one, wrap around the sky many times when the camera is close to the black hole. This sky-wrapping is caused by the black hole's spin, dragging space into a whirling motion around itself like the air in a whirling tornado, and stretching the caustics around the black hole many times."
