![]() It affects any physical process that involves time, including all the molecular interactions in your body that keep you alive and cause you to age. Note that this isn’t just something that affects clocks. Such extreme dilation is possible due to Gargantua’s immense mass and proportionally immense gravity. The cumulative effect of these two facts is that time itself runs slower on Miller’s world relative to the rest of the universe: 1 hour on the planet equals 7 years on Earth. Both of these effects noticeably affect Miller’s world: it’s zipping around Gargantua at nearly 50% lightspeed in its orbit, and is very deep in the black hole’s extreme gravity well. The warping of time is referred to as “time dilation,” and can occur when A) two objects are travelling incredibly fast relative to each other and/or B) an object is in an extreme gravity field. They are intertwined into one 4D entity – spacetime – and can be stretched and warped. Q3: Why do clocks tick slower there? And why did the crew age slower?Ī: One of the consequences of Special & General Relativity is that time and space are not absolute, independent things. When you run the math, you find that the tidal forces experienced by Miller’s world would be enough to slightly deform the planet into an egg-shape, but not enough to rip it apart it’ll stay in one piece. Compared to that, the width of Miller’s world is absolutely puny. Gargantua’s event horizon is as wide as Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Remember, a tidal force comes about because gravity has a different strength on two sides of an object. So how does Miller’s world stay in one piece if it’s so close? Counter-intuitively, it’s because Gargantua is so massive: tidal forces around a black hole decrease as the black hole gets larger. But go near a black hole with much more intense gravity, and the effect can be very significant, enough to rip your body apart before you get anywhere near the event horizon. Of course, Earth’s gravity is weak enough that you’ll never actually notice. That means there’s actually a difference in gravity between the two, which manifests as a force working to stretch you vertically – a tidal force. Right now, as you’re sitting in front of your computer, your feet are slightly closer to Earth’s center than your head. Q2: Wouldn't the planet be torn to shreds from intense tidal forces?Ī: This might stem from a misconception of what tidal forces actually are. The orbit is also stable: any perturbation pushing the planet slightly closer or further away will cause an opposing reaction force, keeping the planet in its orbit. It turns out, when you run the math, that there is an orbit just outside the event horizon where gravity and centrifugal effects balance out, and Miller’s world can reside. Gargantua is 100 million times heavier than the Sun and spins at 99.8% of lightspeed 0.99999999999999x the maximum possible spin, so this effect is significant. When enough mass spins fast enough, it can actually “drag” the spacetime around it in a spinning motion. But Miller's world is extremely close to Gargantua, so what's holding it there? While Gargantua does have extreme gravity, another property of the singularity can help counteract it in some cases – its spin. Only when an object gets extremely close (roughly when distance to the event horizon < diameter of the event horizon) does the extreme curvature of spacetime prevent stable orbits from existing. Q1: Why doesn't the planet get sucked into the black hole if it's so close?Ī: Contrary to popular belief, it is perfectly possible to safely orbit a black hole. The surface is covered in a global ocean, and any given point is inundated by skyscraper-size waves every hour or so (local time). The planet orbits so close that time passes ~61,000x slower on its surface compared to the outside universe due to gravitational time dilation. General premise: Miller's world is a roughly Earth-size planet orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua. The following is based on information provided in chapter 17 of Kip Thorne's The Science of Interstellar. In this post I hope to correct some misconceptions about Miller's world, which seems to be getting the brunt of the criticism. While some are legitimate criticisms, the vast majority have fairly simple explanations. On several forums I've seen moviegoers poking & prodding at "plot holes" and "science errors" in Interstellar.
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