Apparently, nobody before made a computer simulation of how a real, scientifically accurate black hole would look like. But behold, the producers of "Interstellar" teamed up with Kip Thorne to provide realistic and surprisingly beautiful renders of a rotating black hole. It's amazing.
Now, a little bit of science. Two interesting things can be seen in this picture. In the movie, the black hole is a spinning (Kerr) black hole and you can see that just by looking at the image of the central object, the sphere that marks the event horizon of a black hole. To a nearby observer, this sphere seems squashed towards the direction of spin and develops a kink on the equator. Interestingly, no study before investigated how a spinning black hole would look like to a nearby observer and all the calculations were usually made for a distant one.
Another thing is that the black hole has an accretion disk, which is just flat disk, like rings of Saturn. But because of immense gravity, light bends around the black hole and creates this interesting illusion that the disk surrounds the central object also from above. Additionally, because the light can travel around the black hole many times, it creates additional images of the disk, sometimes inverted, like the bottom part on the picture on the left, or the thin line near the horizon. |
You can read more on Phys.org or if you want to read Kip Thorne's article then follow the link.