From The Last Word on Nothing, by Richard Panek:
If you haven’t seen the movie Interstellar, you might not recognize the image above. It’s the black hole that figures prominently in the climax. But even if you have seen the movie, chances are excellent you still don’t know what you’re looking at. I didn’t, anyway, at least the first few days I spent staring at it.
This past summer I worked on a media project involving this fictional black hole. The project didn’t come to fruition, but I did sign a confidentiality agreement, so I don’t know how much I can reveal about it. What I can discuss, however, is the science behind the movie’s black hole, if only because part of my job was to understand it.
The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Christopher Nolan has said he wanted Interstellar to show the first true image of a black hole—what it would actually look like if you were near one. And in order to achieve that goal, he said, he would try to combine science and art.
Read the rest of the article here.