An astrophysicist ranks parts of Interstellar , from the totally plausible to the “you’d definitely need aliens for that”. SPOILERS AHEAD, of course.
Professor Kip Thorne, the science advisor and executive producer of Interstellar, has written an excellent book called The Science of Interstellar in which he describes several plot points and how he thinks they could be made to agree with our understanding of physics.
That's not what we're doing here. The goal of this post is not to detract from the storytelling or criticise the writers (it's fiction, after all!) but rather to give you an idea of what astrophysicists have actually seen, and how that compares with what you see in the movie.
There's a solar-powered drone that stays up for decades.
Depends on design, but this is probably possible. The solar-powered Opportunity Mars rover has been going strong for ten years, and it's on Mars, which is further away from the sun than we are.
(It seems really unlikely that Cooper would be able to hack into the drone though. Did all world governments use the same guidance programs, accessible via short-range wi-fi?)
Verdict: Believable.
Warner Bros
There's a black hole that looks like this.
Supermassive black holes exist and are very common in the Universe. We have one in the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way – in fact, we’ve seen supermassive black holes in the centers of nearly every galaxy we’ve studied. Ours is called Sagittarius A* and is due to rip a gas cloud to shreds soon.
The appearance of the black hole in Interstellar is based on real physics simulations led by Kip Thorne, so that's accurate too. It turns out Hollywood special effects companies can do hardcore physics visualisations in a fraction of the time that universities can, because money.
And the shape of the light surrounding the black hole in the film makes sense. Black holes, like all massive objects, bend spacetime around them, which in turn bends light around them. This is called gravitational lensing, and we see it when light from behind the black hole is bent around it in an "Einstein ring" shape. Depending on how you approached the black hole, you could definitely see a bright halo around the hole as well as light from an accretion disk of matter swirling into the black hole.
Verdict: Pretty reasonable.
Warner Bros
There's an artificial wormhole that looks something like this.
A wormhole is a tunnel through the fabric of space and time that lets you jump between two distant places in the universe. While we've never actually seen one, they are a perfectly reasonable possibility in the realm of pure theory.
But wormholes are impossible for us to build without massive changes in our understanding of physics. You'd need a type of exotic matter with negative mass that, sadly, probably doesn't exist and can't be made.
The appearance of the wormhole in the film was based on real physics simulations, led by Kip Thorne, a world expert on wormholes. So while they may be impossible to construct, the film version was as accurate as it could be.
But let's say the wormhole did exist, and were traversable. What they look like on the inside (and how long it takes a spaceship to get through one) would be a total guess – especially as the extreme warping of spacetime would also very likely rip your ship apart.
Verdict: Pretty sound, in a theorist sort of way.
Warner Bros
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