Interstellar rendering and gravitational lensing

Especially for the film Interstellar, the British animation company Double Negative created a black hole rendering model based on the mathematical calculations of astrophysics Kip Thorne, a scientific consultant for motion pictures.

The rendering process revealed an interesting effect of gravitational lensing. Kip Thorne himself explains this phenomenon in a scientific article published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity .

Rendering has shown that a person or a robot traveling to the horizon of a black hole event will be able to see up to 13 copies of individual stars and even the entire galaxy as a whole. The reason is that at some points, called caustics, the light will concentrate, forming a kind of reflection of a star or any other object.
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This phenomenon is associated with the rotation of a black hole and gravitational perturbations in the surrounding space.

“In order to get rid of the blinking and make the picture for the film perfectly smooth, we changed our algorithms in a way that no one ever did. Instead of following the movement of individual rays using the Einstein equations, we began to track the paths and distortion in the forms of whole beams of rays. When this model was ready, we realized that it could also be used for scientific research, ”said Oliver James, lead scientist at Double Negative.



It is not known how valid the Thorn model is, but it is quite suitable as one of the theories.

Now the created simulator can be used to study other, more complex processes occurring in the vicinity of rotating black holes. This is how a part of the giant budgets of Hollywood were redirected to the benefit of science.

Probably, this trend should be continued, and for every science fiction film on a space theme to invite a group of scientists. For a million dollars, they will do some useful research on data visualization. And the film will turn out more beautiful, and a good thing for science.