Oppenheimer, The story of the father of the atomic bomb, was released in theaters this week, achieving extraordinary reviews. has a direct connection to interstellar, both directed by Christopher Nolan: the formation of black holes.
Cinema, history, physics and science fiction joined.
The point is that, as he explains Fran Chico for the specialized portal Fotogramas, J. Robert Oppenheimer had his first investigations into the formation of black holes… key elements in Interstellar.
By 1939, the enigmatic American physicist applied Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to the study of the contraction and gravitational collapse of massive stars.
It was Oppenheimer who proposed the existence of black holes, based not only on Einstein’s theory, but also in studies by Karl Schwarzschild and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Oppenheimer and the formation of black holes
Oppenheimer “predicted that a neutron star could collapse for the reasons Chandrasekhar put forward,” account Gonzalo López Sánchez for ABC, pointing to the so-called Chandrasekhar limit.
“Later, (the American) interpreted the singularity, from the Schwarzschild radius, as a bubble where time stopped, for external observers, but not for the observers who fell into the jaws of the hole. Lopez Sanchez added.
Then the Second World War would come and his studies on black holes stopped, being taken up by other researchers later.
Interstellar becomes a bridge to reality
Kip Thorne, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, would help Christopher Nolan with the subject of black holes for his 2014 film, interstellar.
In it, a group of astronauts travel through space looking for a new home for humanity. With Thorne as an adviser, Nolan shaped a black hole which would serve for the end of the film.
The Event Horizon Telescope, in 2022, it would reveal the first image of a black hole, much like what Thorne anticipated for Interstellar and proving what Oppenheimer had predicted.