Interstellar Wiki
Register
Advertisement
Black hole

Miller orbiting Gargantua

Gargantua is massive, rapidly spinning black hole orbited by the planets Miller and Mann, as well as the neutron star Pantagruel, which is orbited by Edmunds and located within a few months flight of the wormhole. In the film's climax, Cooper and Amelia Brand travel close to the black hole's singularity in order to use its massive gravity in order to slingshot the Endurance towards Edmunds in order to save fuel.

In Kip Thorne's book, The Science of Interstellar, he mentions that Gargantua does not have a jet or a superheated blue accretion disk, indicating it has probably not devoured a star in millions of years.

History

The black hole Gargantua was used for a powered slingshot maneuver to facilitate Brand's arrival on Edmunds, as the Endurance did not have enough fuel to reach Edmunds on its own. Gargantua also transported Cooper and TARS to the tesseract, allowing them see into the black hole's singularity and transmit the quantum data to Cooper's daughter. Presumably, Gargantua is in or near to the center of the galaxy for which it resides. Due to the presence of large amounts of neutron stars and IMBHs (intermediate mass black holes) it could possible be even the center of the home galaxy.

2008 script

The names of the neutron star and black hole most likely come from, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel, a pentology of novels written in the 16th century by Francois Rabelais, featuring the adventures of two giants: Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. In the 2008 script, Pantagruel is actually a smaller black hole, with an icy planet orbiting it.

Links

Advertisement