Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar · HackerPapers discussions

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by SvenL

Thu, 21 May 2026 08:26:24 GMT

Well, interstellar has also some nerd stuff in it. If I remember correctly Kip Thorne did physics consulting on the movie and they even use a simulation running on a cluster to visualize the black hole physically correct. They could have used some arbitrary CGI…but no, they wanted it accurate according to science. https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by lupsasca

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 17:46:02 GMT

The black hole simulation that was shown in the movie Interstellar is explained in detail in this paper, freely available on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808 As a physicist with a modest background in computing, I was also surprised by how powerful the iPhone GPU is. It can indeed lens the input from the camera at high resolution and in real time with high FPS.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by NKosmatos

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 11:06:22 GMT

If you want to avoid opening Twitter (now known as X), here is the link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03808 TLDR “A typical IMAX image has 23 million pixels, and for Interstellar we had to generate many thousand images, so DNGR had to be very efficient. It has 40,000 lines of C++ code and runs across Double Negative’s Linux-based render-farm. Depending on the degree of gravitational lensing in an image, it typically takes from 30 minutes to several hours running on 10 CPU cores to create a single IMAX image. Our London render-farm comprises 1633 Dell-M620 blade servers; each blade…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — HN submission

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 14:26:06 GMT

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and Interstellar

40 points; 27 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — HN submission

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 14:02:47 GMT

Gravitational Lensing of Black Holes in the Movie Interstellar

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by a_d

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 17:01:29 GMT

Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808 Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar. Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped”…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by nikofeyn

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 16:27:25 GMT

> I'll use Isaac Arthur dismissal of FTL travel as to why what credentials does he have? > Put me firmly in the camp that believes the speed of light is a hard limit on the universe the speed of light isn't a limit in the sense that nothing can be greater than it. it is a crossover point that can't be crossed over for things above or below it to the other side. > I'm not sure why it matters that a black hole would be spinning. black holes that spin are much different than non-spinning holes and have more complicated dynamics. if they are spinning, they are dragging space-time along with them.…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — mentioned by jonas21

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 19:55:31 GMT

On a related note, there's a paper by the Interstellar special effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne describing how they rendered the black hole in the film and the tradeoffs they made: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — HN submission

Sat, 21 Jul 2018 14:00:50 GMT

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in the Movie Interstellar (2015)

103 points; 33 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — HN submission

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 17:00:58 GMT

[1502.03808] Lensing by Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in Interstellar

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar — HN submission

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:47:42 GMT

Gravitational Lensing by Black Holes in the Movie Interstellar [pdf]

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.