The sun is green. Seems awfully white when you look at it. Would it still seem white if it’s frequency distribution was red- or blueshifted a bit, I wonder? Or rather, how far would 5700K black body radiation have to be shifted for it to no longer seem white to the human eye?
Not trying to defend the film here, haven’t even seen it yet, just got me wondering.
Well as far as I can tell, the Sun is whitish because its spectral “peak” is so large that it covers the entire visible spectrum. It would indeed appear green if we could see further in the infra-red and ultraviolet. On the other hand, red dwarfs or blue giants do appear red and blue, because their “peak” is shifted out of view.
For what I understand, it would be the same with the disk : the shift toward red on one side and blue on the other side would be enough to move the bulk of the white light, and clearly tint it in redder and bluer.
In the article (in French) about an older simulation from above, the author said that they voluntarily skipped it because spectators wouldn’t understand but Kip Thorne is adding it back in the simulation he uses for his black hole papers.
Even 2001 Space Odissey fell for that, mind you. Originally, the Discovery was supposed to have radiators (wait, that’s something else that the Endurance doesn’t have!) but they cut them because “people know that starships don’t have wings”. You can see artworks here and (scrolling down a bit) a nuclear pulse version, because it just look badass.
Everyone still should have been irradiated by the accretion disk. In fact, there isn’t actually h good reason to explore this system. It’s guaranteed to be as sterile as you can get, at least for LAWKI.
From what I’ve heard, Gargantua is supposed to have a mass of ~100 million solar masses. That a) puts this system at a galactic center, and b) gives its accretion disk a temperature on the order of a few tens of thousands of degrees. It would have a peak in the UV, and give off a very bright blue-white light. The disk basically behaves as an O or B class star. Or, really, several of them. Or several hundred thousand, depending on how much material is infalling. However much light the thing throws off is of little consequence; between the neutron star, the black hole itself, and the fact that this system pretty much has to be found near a galactic center, everyone in the system should have been extra tasty crispy within hours of arriving in the system. If not seconds.
At this size, the accretion disk should also actually stretch out for over 10 billion km from the event horizon, or something like 70 AU. Even if the black hole is dormant at the time of the movie, it will have an accretion disk, and that disk will dwarf the actual size of the black hole.
The movie can kind of be forgiven for this, because Kip Thorne only modelled the black hole out to something like 2 or 3 gravitational radii. He didn’t care about the region outside if that, and so the producers never got anything outside of that region. And, of course, they wouldn’t know any better (and their science advisor didn’t give a crap, because he doesn’t study black hole accretion disks).
The long and short of it are that the planets are uninhabitable, their orbits are unstable, and there should be a large amount of very hot has in the system, either infalling from the galactic environment, or as a large accretion disk.
I need to watch the movie again to rate it… but…
Sounds like you take feud with this topic the most, though I don’t know why. I mean, should I really spell the obvious reasons why there was a “Apollo-esque rocket launch”?
Emm… What are you doing there?.. I understand that you hate Michio Kaku for moving into fields of science that he either isn’t expert in or uses theories that are based on speculation to wow the media, but you are now giving us calculations based on a rumor. I don’t doubt your calculations, but since Nolan did hire science advisors, you shouldn’t dismiss them, rather be skeptical of the source.
I am disappointed in you and with this community’s fan-like satisfaction of your statements.
So, what if my source happened to be the movie’s science advisor?
books.google.ca/booksid=PbWYBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT103&lpg=PT103&dq=gargantua+100+million&source=bl&ots=h7DcydvjaU&sig=4mCGAPzDiUuZVErUvzf85CajOKE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X9CEVKTyHIOUyASMxYH4BQ&redir_esc=y
About the spaceplane, I recently thought about an explanation.
As they visibly don’t have big fuel tanks, they are using extremely compact fuel source, like antimatter. So the spaceplane actually have an antimatter drive. Now, having NASA running around with rockets is already not seen with the best eye (and given a pass only because this pesky end of the world and stuff), but taking off with a freaking antimatter engine was simply too much.
So, to reassure the heirs of those people confusing RTG and salt nuclear bombs, they made the thing blast off from Earth with severely obsolete but clean water-producing chemical rockets (and only because horses didn’t have enough delta-v).
Sure, it makes no sense, but trying to stop Galileo to take off didn’t either, did it?
About the black hole, galactic black holes can sometimes be ejected from their galaxies. I’ve read that a black hole merger (possible with a galaxy merger) can cause it to be ejected as it release a colossal asymmetric gravitational wave. Maybe there are other phenomena that can do that.
So we have a black hole that has been ejected very early in the galactic age, is rotating extremely fast (maybe because of said merger?), has an old, old disk that isn’t really accreting anymore and had the time to cool down to optical temperatures (from X-/gamma ray temperatures) and at the point of the movie, got somewhere where there are stars around but not too much.
Also, it recently got this planet in a super-close orbit that is still shaking from the tidal lock (hence the waves), and hasn’t yet been blown to bits by a tiny meteor on an oposite orbit (at a few percent of light speed, you don’t need much to bust a planet - and if you have several ones, then “Kessler syndrome” takes a whole new magnitude).
Vanishingly improbable to find one around, but not exactly impossible at the scale of the unfathomably vast Universe. The transcendents are still dicks to have put the other end in such a system, though. (And it doesn’t explain the other inconsistencies)
(And the mildew. I simply can’t forgive the mildew.)
Amusingly, both ends of the wormhole don’t have to be at the same time (as much as “same time” makes sense when they are out of each-other light-cone). So it would have been interesting to actually have the other end’s sky to be red with ancient red dwarfs, long past today’s Spring of Stars, and at the end of the Age of Stars itself - with the Universe slowly getting darker and darker until the final night.
They wouldn’t even have to explain it. For most spectators, it would have been a discrete way of showing a different, slightly alien sky on the other hand; a nice thing to better accentuate the distance between the two places, along with the black hole Sun and strange planets. And for those who would have gotten it or heard of it, well, the end of the Universe, when the last lights are going out, is an interesting place to talk about - in a more than century-long tradition - possibly starting with The Night Land as early as 1908.
The movie is barely out in theatre and I’m already thinking about all the things a remake should do to make it better 