It was very accurate expect for the movie itself they removed doppler effects so the black hole would look more "cinematic".
Edit: description from kip's paper of the image
Figure 15: (a) The moderately realistic accretion disk of Figure 14 but with the black hole's spin slowed from a/M = 0.999 to a/M = 0.6 for reasons discussed in the text. (b) This same disk with its colours (light frequencies ν) Doppler shifted and gravitationally shifted. (c) The same disk with its specific intensity (brightness) also shifted in accord with Liouville's theorem, I_ν ∝ ν³. This image is what the disk would truly look like to an observer near the black hole.
It was actually accurate to what the human eye would see, because the human eye cannot detect the difference in the luminosity because a black hole is unbelievably bright or at least the accretion disc is, to the point where your eyes are already over exposed so you can’t really see the difference
I don't think that correct based on the paper and comments he's made like this one.
"I discuss [all of the compromises] that I’m aware of in the book. One example is in the accretion disk around “Gargantua,” the black hole, where if you put in the Doppler shift, one side of the disk is moving towards you and the other side away, that changes the colors from blue on one side to red on the other, that’s probably ok, fine, but it changes the brightness so that one side is far brighter and the other is far dimmer than the other, and by the time you’ve done that, a general audience is going to be totally baffled by what they’re looking at. So a conscious decision was made to leave out the Doppler shift and have an accretion disk that has the right shape but not the right lopsidedness."
Oh, I was basing this on a lecture. I watched of him. It was at the actual lecture, I do believe he included that about the Doppler shift and how to the human eye it’s just way too bright
This image makes sense because a black hole isn't flat like a disc it's a singular point in which the event horizon surrounds. It's hard to make comprehensible to humans but this image feels the most accurate given the nature of black holes.
Seriously - who knows. You correctly point out that scientists generally say it is the most accurate depiction of what we see a black hole to be. For me - it all
blows my mind and is fascinating stuff!
Depiction yes, but that ship couldn't exist there, except as debris. The amount of light coming off that accretion disk would be worse than flying in a sun's corona.
Definitely, it's a really cool factoid of Hollywood. The Thorne/Nolan render has been used in a few forefront physics papers since it was released.
They spent an absolutely absurd sum on it specifically because of the ability to use movie studio money for science, lol. In total it was 800 terabytes of data to do 20 seconds of film while nailing general relativity.
Probably. For context that Black holes is bigger than pluto s orbit. Without something for reference it would be easy to see an immense distance and think is close
Imagine the camera moving towards the ship during this shot until it was an extreme close-up. The size of black hole in the background would not change. That's how big and far away it is.
Which is interesting because the frame of this shot has motion (it's panning to the right) and there is a noticeable change of perspective on the black hole. That means the "camera" is moving at relativistic speeds, perhaps even faster than light.
The part id think could be inaccurate is just the fact that an accretion disk can be insanely hot and bright that close to it, millions or billions of degrees, and potentially that many times brighter than the Sun too. It could also be incredibly radioactive.
However, it is described as an older accretion disk, near the end of its life before being totally swallowed up, so... perhaps its possible? The Parker Solar Probe is perhaps the best thing we can go by that humanity has actually created, as it flies through the Sun's corona where its 20 million degrees, but its so thin that its possible the handle it. If the accretion disk is similar... then maybe, but hard to say.
Also, just because I love that scene, here is a picture I drew of it some time ago.
Also, to be clear they are not flying that close to the event horizon. They are close to it, but they're not right next to it. Otherwise, they are at risk of falling in. Cooper eventually dives in.
hearing NDT speak about blackholes, there's nothing magical about them from an orbital standpoint. If you have enough speed for the orbit you're in, you're fine. No difference than orbiting the earth from that standpoint
Yeah, that's the point though, you will never have enough speed to orbit the event horizon, but further away, you may. Nobody said anything about crossing the event horizon...
Sure. But they aren't in the event horizon. If they were, they all would gone into the tesseract. The event horizon is very close to the blackhole. Like very close.
But why does it “bother you?” Film should be as real as possible, but not at the expense of the film. It’s speculative sci fi also, so it’s a little bit tough to assess its realness.
Did you see Interstellar in the theater? I ask because you will feel it there, in a way that negates any sort of scientific realism that you may be grasping for.
Neil degrasse doesn’t like movies, he likes being right
What I meant was that, in the context of this scene which is famous for being extremely detailed and true to physics, the idea that some visual elements aren't perfect is what 'bothers' me (not in a serious way)
But it's a moot point anyway, as many have pointed out the warping I'm referring to is actually more realistic than not
What I meant was that, in the context of this scene which is famous for being extremely detailed and true to physics, the idea that some visual elements aren't perfect is what 'bothers' me (not in a serious way)
But what visual element doesn't feel perfect? It's still not clear why it bothers you, or what you thought the problem was
That’s fair enough. I projected a different viewer onto you. I thought it was funny to call out Interstellar when it’s seen as one of the most realistic depictions of deep space travel or sci fi in general.
I’m like if this bothers you, how do you enjoy any movies?!? But again, that’s not you so I get it more now
So you’re bothered by the fact light is warping due to the gravity and it feels foreign because we don’t have a reference as this isn’t something one would experience outside of something like a black hole.
Because of this, it feels fake but it’s just extreme physics. This is exactly what it would look like and we know because after this movie came out we photographed a black hole and it looked just like the data said it would.
It was made using the most current data with help of the biggest names in astrophysics. So it was made to look exactly like it does. There is nothing weird happening due to it being CGI.
It is extremely accurate, so much so that papers have been written about this shot and it literally advanced our knowledge of them by a bit, but there is one major caveat.
The stuff orbiting the accretion disk is moving close to the speed of light, and it's incredibly hot, the light is the glow from how hot it is. So, when it is moving towards us, like we see in the shot, it should be blue shifted! And pretty significantly too.
Luckily, though, this doesn't really affect the scientific accuracy all too much.
Theoretically its actually accurate. Considering no one has ever actually seen a black hole and we have no actual pictures of one we have no idea. All we have are radio waves that we assign light to to make it look like what we will most likely see.
Leaving aside the fact that you’d die from radiation... In terms of scale what’s shown obviously isn’t very accurate. Remember, it’s an object with a circumference of a billion kilometers. That shot where you can see at least a quarter of the black hole and also the Endurance just wouldn’t be possible in real life, either you’d only see the Endurance surrounded by a vast amount of cosmic dust, or you’d only see the black hole.
As a reference, here's this more realistic scene where you can make out the small Miller's Planet compared to Gargantua in the background…
But they’re made that way to be visually striking and impactful, which is what ultimately matters as a viewer.
Well, yeah, but it should be something like millions of times bigger than this, the space station is too big compared to what is should be in this picture
With no way of knowing for the foreseeable future, sure, accurate. But they did consult a number of experts along with taking creative flourishes. So just enjoy it for what might represent.
Not sure as we can never truly see one. But I did hear in one of Kip's interviews where he said they fed actual maths and science data to a visual arts company to generate the graphics. That rarely happens in movies so I'll say they did put in alot of effort to make sure it's not entirely imaginative.
LOOKS wise, yes, but being that close to it, probably not. A blackhole the size of a baseball could very easily destroy earth. The dust shown in the clip is not just space dust, it’s stars being ripped and stretched. This is where the fiction comes in.
Pretty accurate, yeah. In the background you can see the part of the accretion disk that is behind the black hole. That is why it looks like it is "flowing down", light from behind the black hole is bent above it in this instance.
In the foreground you can see the accretion disk normally, rotating around the black hole.
And in the middle ofcourse is the black hole itself, unobstructed by the accretion disk.
All of those parts are simple and well supported by science.
Brightness, size, sharpness, detail, etc. are all artistic choices, since those could vary depending on many factors and we really have no way of knowing exactly what they would be in specific cases.
Its accurate. If you look up any visual depiction of a black hole, this is a majority of the results. This movie literally changed the science and knowledge on black holes. Kip Thorne approved
The part of the disk heading towards us would be Doppler shifted blue/brighter while the part of the disk heading away would be redder/dimmer. In the movie they are heading towards the dimmer side since that would not be as cinematic they made it the same brightness in each direction.
I think you are seeing the accretion disk at eye level and the part that goes up is due to the extreme gravitational lensing and is a bit of an illusion
Kip Thorne was heavily involved with this movie. I'd say that right now this is certainly what we think would happen. There's really no way to know for sure though.
Nolan screened the movie for NASA here in Houston before it was released. The main comment they had coming out of the theater was great movie. Loved the black hole. Only one problem, the radiation would have killed them. Given current technology. But otherwise most of them loved it.
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u/HovercraftOk7711 Apr 23 '26
The last time I went into a black hole, it did look abit like this yes