Interstellar

Description

The 2014 sci-fi movie Interstellar was the first Hollywood movie which attempted to depict a scientifically correct version of what the world looks like in the presence of strong gravitational fields, such as black holes or wormholes. A lot of the imagery was produced in collaboration with Prof. Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist known for his contributions to gravitational physics.

The images are often weird and unexpected, not just for movie audiences, but even sometimes for the team who made them, despite the fact that many aspects of the behaviour of light rays in strong gravitational fields had been known for a long time.

In this project you will use General Relativity to study the mathematics that underlies these fascinating images. You will learn how to compute how strong gravitational fields influence the behaviour of light rays, and learn how to do this yourself using your own computer code.

Prerequisites

A module in which you have seen some numerical techniques, for instance Mathematical Modelling II or Numerical Analysis II will be helpful. You also need to be enthusiastic about programming as most of the really interesting things cannot be done without resort to computer methods.

You do not need to have had any prior exposure to General Relativity.

Some background material

The physics of the images generated for Interstellar has been described in two papers,

• "Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and the Movie Interstellar"; James, von Tunzelmann, Franklin and Thorne, available from arXiv as 1502.03808.
• "Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole"; James, von Tunzelmann, Franklin and Thorne, available from arXiv as 1502.03809.

These papers contain an overview about the history of the topic of rendering images which take into account General Relativity, and provide many other references.