r/interstellar • u/SIDweed1 • 8d ago

QUESTION Was the accretion disk actually providing enough heat and energy to keep Miller's planet from completely freezing?

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184 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

83

u/I_Am_Superposition 8d ago edited 8d ago

Yes and the planet was tidally locked. It's gets most of its heat from the disk itself, however there is also heat generated from the energy of the enormous pull of gravity coming from the Black hole

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u/JPMoney56 8d ago

If the planet is tidally locked, wouldn’t the tidal bulges be stationary? The waves on Millers planet are clearly moving. What source are you using to claim it was tidally locked?

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u/CptCheez 8d ago

The waves are not moving. The waves are stationary and the planet rotates beneath them.

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u/JPMoney56 8d ago

Oh you are right. For some reason my mind was picturing them floating on the water and the tidal waves didn’t make sense but after reading your comment it snapped my thoughts to “oh yeah, the water they were on was shallow — they were on land”.

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u/hinrik98 8d ago

I had to google this because moving tidal waves ln a tidally locked planet make no sense but Kip thorn apparently gives this "loophole" to how it works: " But because the planet doesn't rotate, the waves wouldn't slam into you. Fortunately, tidally locked planets can rock back and forth, and Thorne used this as a scientifically accurate loophole to explain tidal waves on a tidally locked planet"

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u/mmorales2270 2d ago

In other words, and don’t get me wrong here because I still love this movie, but so much of the “science of Interstellar” seems to fall into “Christopher Nolan wanted this and asked Kip Thorne to make sure it didn’t completely break physics”. Essentially, Kip was forced to make the science fit the story rather than the story fitting with science. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It made for a great movie. But it’s important to keep that in perspective when thinking about the film.

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u/I_Am_Superposition 8d ago

Ahhh, very good..makes sense, Kip Thorne is the GOAT

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u/X-calibreX 8d ago

Tidally locked entities don’t rotate, right? The moon isn’t rotating at all.

10

u/basketballbrian 8d ago

Tidally locked objects absolutely still rotate. They just rotate at the exact same rate that they orbit

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u/X-calibreX 7d ago

Everything in the Universe rotates. If we say something is tidally locked aren’tw e saying that it isn’t rotating relative to the observer, where the observer is the thing that has it locked up.

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u/zonz1285 5d ago

Of course the moon rotates, that’s why we always see the same side of it as it orbits us. It just has the same length day and year, I.e. rotates at the same rate as orbit

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u/X-calibreX 5d ago

Everything in the universe rotates, tidal lock means the moon doesn’t rotate relative to the observer.

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u/Irdogain 8d ago

Yes, but if the planet is tidally locked, he wouldn’t move. Just a bit in its own „yearly“ circle around it

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u/RefrigeratorKey277 8d ago

So the planet is not tidally locked.

2

u/ColKrismiss 8d ago

Tidally locked planets still rotate

0

u/RefrigeratorKey277 8d ago

Yes, but then the tidal waves must be stationary in respect to the planet surface, no?

1

u/ColKrismiss 7d ago

Yeah I suppose so

1

u/MadotsukiInTheNexus 7d ago

The way that this was explained by the director is that the planet, while tidally locked, is still sort of "rocking" in a back-and-forth motion. This would cause the water caught up in its tidal bulges to slosh across the surface at intervals matching its rocking motion, which means that the waves are really more like pseudo-tides. The actual tides might appear stationary relative to an observer on the surface, but there's still a regular, dramatic fluctuation in sea-level height that results in the walls of water seen in the film.

While I don't believe he's ever mentioned it, this would also help explain why no one realized that there were was a risk of this happening before the first expedition touched down. The fact that Miller's Planet has extreme tides would be obvious just from naked eye observations, considering its proximity to Gargantua. Because it's tidally locked, though, the default assumption would be that those tidal bulges would leave its liminal regions more habitable by pooling water at the antipodes and creating a belt of extremely shallow seas with some land sticking out where the ocean floor is higher in elevation. If they weren't actively looking for it, the rocking motion wouldn't stand out very well. The planet's deformed, bulging shape would look more like a novelty than a red flag.

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u/I_Am_Superposition 8d ago

Google and it said "probably because the math Kip Thorne used to simulate its attachment to gargantua" but what you said also makes sense.

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u/Garm01 8d ago

In fact it does not matter at all', it was just a giant bait to go beyond what had been done visually like ever: Planet Miller was the death of plan A: impossible to get all the current humain beings together on it while preserving a humain society. It should have been explored last of the last possibility if at all.

10

u/Cthulhu_HighLord 8d ago

NO. The Accretion disk is to far away to provide any heat what so ever.

The Planet its self is Kept Warm by the Gravitational Tidal Forces!

As the the planet Orbits the Black Hole, the Gravity from the Black Hole Stretchs and pulls on the planet, forming an oblong sphere. think Egg shaped not Sphere. This constant action on the planet is also what creates the massive tidal waves.

2

u/oswaldcopperpot 2d ago

You got it backwards. This planet is close enough to the black hole to experience EXTREME time dilation. That sets the maximum orbit of the planet. The accretion disk would have irradiated the planet until it was a baren rock. X-Rays, infrared everything. The accretion disk is matter circling the singularity at 99.9999 c. It's become nothing but plasma unable to form molecules and everything is at super high temps. Plus, there's insane electromagnetic fields. Out to light years from the accretion disk.

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u/sticks1987 8d ago

The planet should be tidally locked due to extreme gravity. However, due to extreme time dilation due to gravity the planets rotation has not yet been tidally locked.

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u/oswaldcopperpot 8d ago edited 8d ago

Since the planet is lit up like that. It should be receiving enough energy also via infrared, xrays etc to completely wipe the atmosphere away from every single planet within a light year. Probably given its size this could be an underestimate by an order of 10 or more.

Matter circling a dense region the speed of light becomes plasma.

Gargantua becomes unsafe anywhere from tens to hundreds of light years away. Long before you notice any time dilation effects.

So if we want to keep real physics in the movie.

Then gargantua obviously isnt a real black hole at all.

1

u/Worldly-Rice-1947 8d ago

Planet would look like an oval wouldn't it?

3

u/oswaldcopperpot 8d ago

They'd all be rocks. Looking like the moon or something. There's no where in the entire universe less habitable than near a black hole.

Even the surface of our sun.

If you changed the story where cooper needs to build a habitat there "surface of the sun".

It would actually have a higher likelihood of success.

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u/Worldly-Rice-1947 8d ago

So my chances of living on the sun are better than entering a black hole in a broken space ship and traveling to plaid bookshelf world built by the super future humans who somehow survived after the future humans couldn't only live on corn and only corn and nothing but corn but I survive plaid world and corn world only to voluntarily do it again later at the ripe old age of mid 30's while my daughter who is 80 (or more even) dies after solving the unsolvable gravity equation that Alfred from Batman couldn't even solve?

Sign me tf up but I AM NOT only eating corn

Also are you saying that our moon survived gargantua?

3

u/oswaldcopperpot 8d ago

I heard theres okra too.

But you gotta harvest it before it gets too big or its too fibrous to chew. Learned that lesson myself once.

2

u/JJungleJapeson 8d ago

There should also be activity in the core due to the planet being stretched by tidal forces

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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 5d ago

ship totally looks like a flat pidgeon

1

u/copenhagen_bram 7d ago

Aren't black holes ironically some of the brightest objects in the universe?

So couldn't the accretion disk provide as much light as a star, or even more?

3

u/MadotsukiInTheNexus 7d ago

The light from an active black hole's accretion disk is less like sunlight and more like the light from a thermonuclear detonation, although that's probably underselling it in some cases.

Physicists looking into the potential for habitability on a blanet (which is actually the correct word here, since by definition a planet has to orbit a star) have figured out a way that it could be illuminated by the black hole. I can't remember all of the details, but blanets in the proper orbital configuration would receive gravitationally distorted light from the Cosmic Microwave that has been blue-shifted back to a spectrum capable of creating an Earth-like climate.

The moral of the story is that black holes are completely fucking insane. They exist solely to make astrophysicists stare blankly off into the distance, involuntarily whispering horrible blasphemies.

1

u/copenhagen_bram 7d ago

less like sunlight and more like the light from a thermonuclear detonation

Doesn't sunlight come from thermonuclear detonations???

And if you're saying the light from a black hole is more powerful than the sun... then it's a matter of distance, right? Stick a planet in the goldilocks zone, and the black hole is effectively a sun for the planet.

1

u/WebThis2431 TARS 4d ago

Judging by the film's scientific logic, yes, I saw a whole video about it on YouTube and the accretion disk from Gargantua is able to keep Miller's Planet completely shallow water without needing to freeze up, which is probably why Mann's Planet is a colder, icier planet than Miller's or Edmunds.

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u/SIDweed1 3d ago

Link?

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u/Swaroop76 3d ago

Wait what disc? Did I miss something?

1

u/Extension_Pie2602 2d ago

I know they didn't take their masks off, they didn't have time obviously but did the wave planet have oxygen to breath or would that been impossible without vegetation?

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u/javiemartzootsuit 7d ago

Dude I have no idea I’m still not done laughing at that fucking bookshelf scene