What Murph is trying to solve in the movie is essentially an elaborately conceptualized Einstein field equation that helps ‘create gravity of your own’, which could allow you to lift entire cities into space. A farmer and ex-astronaut, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is tasked with leading a NASA mission through a wormhole to another galaxy in order to investigate three potentially inhabitable planets. Interstellar 4K BlackholeInterstellar 4K HDR IMAX Into The Black Hole 2160p 10bit HDR IMAX 5.1 DTSEarths future has been riddled by disasters, famines. Subscribe to BBC Focus magazine for fascinating new Q&As every month and follow on Twitter for your daily dose of fun science facts. The LIGO discovery captured the gravitational waves of two colliding black holes 1.2 billion light years away. So despite the odds, it may just be possible that there are black holes out there with planets orbiting them. One possibility is that they were formed after the supernova, from the debris created by the explosion. Quite how they survived the destruction of their parent star is something of a mystery. Jumping into a blackhole like Cooper, even if bizarre, is the only solution we currently have to tie gravitation and quantum physics together. That said, in 1992 the very first planets ever discovered beyond our own solar system were found orbiting a pulsar, another form of supernova remnant. The chances of any planet remaining intact through such a cataclysmic event seem pretty slim. That’s because black holes of solar mass are usually the remnants of huge stars that run out of nuclear fuel and detonate in a supernova explosion. Whether any planets really do orbit black holes is a different matter, however. For a black hole with the same mass as our Sun, the required speed is the same as that needed to orbit at the same distance from our parent star. As such, they’ll cheerfully allow anything to orbit them if it travels fast enough. There’s no fundamental reason why not: despite their reputation for devouring anything that goes into them, black holes are really just another source of gravity – like a star. 13 Wired has a fun piece about physicist and black-hole guru Kip Thorne’s work on the film Interstellar, which comes out November 7. Is it possible for a planet to be in orbit around a black hole?
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