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Interstellar Movie Analysis: The Black Hole

Every people who lived in the 21st century would probably know about the Interstellar movie. Lately, the movie is becoming a must-watch movie because it rates 8.9/10 in IMDb and 73% in Rotten Tomatoes. This science-fiction movie tells a story about an interstellar exploration that is conducted to find a new planet for the human race. Interstellar shows a lot of astrophysics theory and phenomenon, one of them are black hole. My analysis brings me into a conclusion that the black hole depicted in Interstellar is a breakthrough which is accurate, phenomenal, yet odd.

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that no particle or light ray entering that region can ever escape from it.1 Research about black holes properties, formations, and appearances has been conducted until today. The Interstellar movie was successful to depict how does black hole really looks like from a relatively close distance. The gravitational lens, the accretion disk, the view from the event horizon that were showed in Interstellar is accurate. Kip Thorne American theoretical physicist and the executive producers was the brain behind these animations. According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yxaUi8LIzE, he solved the equation that he made himself and get a clear picture about how a black hole looks from a relatively close distance. By making this clear and accurate images, Interstellar has taken filming and animations into a new level.

There are a lot of movies that have a black hole scene within it. The Black Hole (1979) depicted a black hole as a simple reddish rotating disk of space dust with lightning struck in it, The Star Trek (2009) showed a black hole as a black sphere that can be bombed, while the Treasure Planet (2002) animated a black hole in the same way The Black Hole movie did. There was no movie released before Interstellar that shows about the black hole as accurate as Interstellar. That makes the black hole animations in Interstellar become so phenomenal.

However, the black hole in Interstellar has an odd part. It is in the centre of it, a part which is called the singularity. A gravitational singularity is the centre of a black hole. A one-dimensional point which contains infinite mass in an infinitely small space, where gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.2 The singularity in Interstellar is described as a 5 dimensional world. It is odd since what scientists know about the singularity is that a man would ever feel it. According to the Deep Astronomy channel video3, humans would never be alive to reach the singularity. As one reaches a black holes event horizon, one would undergoes a strong gravitational force from the horizon and the anti-horizon. These tremendous forces applies in an opposite direction and would tear apart human body at any moment. Besides, no one has ever known how a fifth dimensional world feels like.

The advances in science and technology enable human to explore the world above their head, the outer space. A lot Hollywood movies tells a story about this outer space and showed fascinating animations to depict it. Despite its controversial concept about the singularity, Interstellar is a must-watch movie that have a phenomenal and accurate animation about the outer space. I hope this movie could inspire human being to work harder and do more research about the outer space so that it can give great benefit to the human beings.

Analitycal essay. Word count: 578 words.

Footnotes: 1. Unknown, Black hole, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole. 2. Unknown, Singularities, The Physics of the Universe,

http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_blackholes_singularities.html. (with few revision)

3. Deep Astronomy channel, A Journey into a Black Hole, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI9CvipHl_c.