Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in the Movie Interstellar (2015) (opens in new tab)

For any non-scientists that are interested in this subject, he published a book about his work on the film that was quite interesting.

To each their own.

A survivor on Earth wouldn't notice it locally, but the presence of a very strong Einstein lens subtending ~ 100 sr on the sky would be unmistakeable.

Essentially, we'd get to observe many photons that would have crashed into the sun's surface (roughly each photon frequency having its own) travelling instead through the space between where that surface would be and very close to the event horizon. We would also see rocky and icy objects that crash into the sun (or are vapourized near some value of its surface) instead passing through a similar near region between each such object's former periastron and very close to the event horizon. Surviving Earthlings could readily test many general-relativistic predictions. The major observational problem would be that dim rocky/metallic/carbonaceous objects are already hard to see even when hot from direct illumination close to the sun, and comets would no longer throw off extremely visible tails.

> lethal doses of gamma radiation

I'm unsure this would be the case -- what would be the source? If it's matter being drawn into jets, why would those be oriented towards the Earth, when the sun's rotational axis does not point at Earth now? Also, what gets drawn into the jets other than matter in the relic fields and whatever bits of rock and ice happen to fall right in on an extremely lucky trajectory, the horizon area being so small? Do you expect a busy accretion structure? Why? And what suppresses visible light if the accretion structure is the source of gammas?

Yeah, if those visualizations are like most scientific visualizations, then they're likely piece of crap. They're likely some low-definition MATLAB frames or a half-assed Java applet that generates visuals comprehensible only by other astrophysicists with powerful imaginations.

There is a great value in taking such work and turning it into accurate, high-resolution renderings of cinematic quality. It makes it easier on imagination, it can reach and interest much wider audience. Hell, thanks to Interstellar's success, we can see newer works of fiction not screwing up their black hole visualizations the way pre-Interstellar fiction always did (even though "correct visualizations had already been done before").