Science fiction is now science fact, thanks to the same people who created the Oscar-nominated visual effects for the movie "Interstellar," according to a press release from the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) in Bristol, England.
The team's explanation of how the same computer code that generated the images for the wormhole, black hole and other celestial bodies in the movie has lead scientists to breakthroughs is published in IOP Publishing's Feb. 13 journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
The Interstellar squad is made up of Double Negative, a London-based visual effects company, and a theoretical physicist from Caltech, Kip Thorne. According to the press release, "when a camera is close up to a rapidly spinning black hole, peculiar surfaces in space, known as caustics, create more than a dozen images of individual stars and of the thin, bright plane of the galaxy in which the black hole lives. They found that the images are concentrated along one edge of the black hole's shadow."
This is the first time caustics have been calculated for a camera near a black hole. The images produced are basically what a person would see if they were orbiting a black hole.
The computer code created the black hole called Gargantua in the movie. The code was tweaked when the standard one light ray for one pixel (for IMAX, 23 million pixels) created flickering as the nebulae and stars crossed the screen.
'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," said Oliver James, co-author of the study and chief scientist at Double Negative, according to the press release. "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."
"This new approach to making images will be of great value to astrophysicists like me. We, too, need smooth images," added Thorne.
"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," continued James.
"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, according to the press release. "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."
Simulations showed how caustics constantly created and annihilated double images of stars. The team noted as many as 13 simultaneous images of the same star and of the galaxy plane where the black hole exists, but they were only able to visualize images from same side as the camera.
