Black hole special effects turns physics equations into visual reality

IT took an astrophysicist, a movie’s special effects team and 800 terabytes of data. Now, we have our first look at what a real black hole may actually look like.

IT took an astrophysicist, a movie’s special effects team and 800 terabytes of data. Now, we have our first look at what a real black hole may look like.

We know they exist. We’ve just never directly seen one.

And we know they’re weird. Really weird.

So the slowly swirling violet-blue twisters that look like the water going down your bath’s drain hole so common in science fiction have been just an analogous image. A representation. A guess.

Interstellar drain ... The black hole from the movie of the same name, complete with villainous and valiant robots. Source: Walt Disney

Thanks to the special effects department of the upcoming movie Interstellar, the iconic super-sucker image has been consigned to history.

The Wired website tells the story of Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist steeped in the theory and equations swirling around the mystery that is a black hole.

He was approached by a big-budget special effects team seeking a sense of reality.

It was an opportunity which he could not pass up.

The result?

Interstellar inspiration ... This is what a rendering of all the known physics involving black holes produces: A halo-encased crystal ball. Source: Paramount

“Why, of course! That’s what it would do.”

All the pieces — the quandaries, equations and effects — fell into place.

And all their preconceptions collapsed.

After number-crunching that would take up to 100 hours to render an individual frame, the true image emerged.

It’s all about gravitational lensing: An effect envisaged by Einstein — and proven by Hubble — where intense gravity would bend light.

New horizons ... The special effects team for the movie Interstellar have helped create an accurate representation of a black hole. Source: Paramount.

We’ve used it as a magnifying glass to observe incredibly distant galaxies.

Now we know what it would look like up-close and personal.

A crystal ball, full of swirling suns, surrounded by a glowing halo of star-stuff.

It looks … weird.

But also wonderful.

“This is our observational data,” Throne told Wired. “That’s the way nature behaves. Period.”