![]() “Interstellar” was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua’s physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.īuilding on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*. student, Caroline Mallary, inspired by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film “Interstellar,” set out to test if Cooper (Matthew McConaughey’s character), could survive his fall deep into Gargantua – a fictional, supermassive, rapidly rotating black hole some 100 million times the mass of our sun. My colleague Lior Burko and I have been investigating the physics of black holes for over two decades. Similarly, passing through a large rotating black hole, you are more likely to come out the other side unharmed. Swipe it through quickly and you won’t feel much. Hold your finger close to the flame and it will burn. That’s because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage. If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically. My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal. The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized. Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst. That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period. This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.īlack holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe.
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