Black Holes Come to the Big Screen

The new movie "Interstellar" explores a longstanding fascination, but UA astrophysicists are using cutting-edge technology to go one better. They're working on how to take pictures of the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

What does a black hole look like up close? When the sci-fi movie "Interstellar" — hitting theaters this week — wows audiences with its computer-generated views of one of most enigmatic and fascinating phenomena in the universe, University of Arizona astrophysicists Chi-kwan Chan, Dimitrios Psaltis and Feryal Ozel are likely to nod appreciatively and say something like, "Meh, that looks nice, but check out what we've got." "We want to know what happens near extremely compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars," said Psaltis, a professor of astronomy and physics in the UA's Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. "We want to watch as matter fed onto a black hole crosses the event horizon, the point of no return, and disappears."