Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar

Interstellar is the first Hollywood movie to attempt depicting a black hole as it would actually be seen by somebody nearby. For this we developed a code called DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer) to solve the equations for ray-bundle (light-beam) propagation through the curved spacetime of a spinning (Kerr) black hole, and to render IMAX-quality, rapidly changing images. Our ray-bundle techniques were crucial for achieving IMAX-quality smoothness without flickering. This paper has four purposes: (i) To describe DNGR for physicists and CGI practitioners . (ii) To present the equations we use, when the camera is in arbitrary motion at an arbitrary location near a Kerr black hole, for mapping light sources to camera images via elliptical ray bundles. (iii) To describe new insights, from DNGR, into gravitational lensing when the camera is near the spinning black hole, rather than far away as in almost all prior studies. (iv) To describe how the images of the black hole Gargantua and its accretion disk, in the movie \emph{Interstellar}, were generated with DNGR. There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting.Comment: 46 pages, 17 figure

ASTRAL PROJECTION: THEORIES OF METAPHOR, PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, AND THE ART O F SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION

This thesis provides an intellectual context for my work in computational scientific visualization for large-scale public outreach in venues such as digitaldome planetarium shows and high-definition public television documentaries. In my associated practicum, a DVD that provides video excerpts, 1 focus especially on work I have created with my Advanced Visualization Laboratory team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Champaign, Illinois) from 2002-2007. 1 make three main contributions to knowledge within the field of computational scientific visualization. Firstly, I share the unique process 1 have pioneered for collaboratively producing and exhibiting this data-driven art when aimed at popular science education. The message of the art complements its means of production: Renaissance Team collaborations enact a cooperative paradigm of evolutionary sympathetic adaptation and co-creation. Secondly, 1 open up a positive, new space within computational scientific visualization's practice for artistic expression—especially in providing a theory of digi-epistemology that accounts for how this is possible given the limitations imposed by the demands of mapping numerical data and the computational models derived from them onto visual forms. I am concerned not only with liberating artists to enrich audience's aesthetic experiences of scientific visualization, to contribute their own vision, but also with conceiving of audiences as co-creators of the aesthetic significance of the work, to re-envision and re-circulate what they encounter there. Even more commonly than in the age of traditional media, on-line social computing and digital tools have empowered the public to capture and repurpose visual metaphors, circulating them within new contexts and telling new stories with them. Thirdly, I demonstrate the creative power of visaphors (see footnote, p. 1) to provide novel embodied experiences through my practicum as well as my thesis discussion. Specifically, I describe how the visaphors my Renaissance Teams and I create enrich the Environmentalist Story of Science, essentially promoting a counter-narrative to the Enlightenment Story of Science through articulating how humanity participates in an evolving universal consciousness through our embodied interaction and cooperative interdependence within nested, self-producing (autopoetic) systems, from the micro- to the macroscopic. This contemporary account of the natural world, its inter-related systems, and their dynamics may be understood as expressing a creative and generative energy—a kind of consciousness-that transcends the human yet also encompasses it

Working Papers: Astronomy and Astrophysics Panel Reports

The papers of the panels appointed by the Astronomy and Astrophysics survey Committee are compiled. These papers were advisory to the survey committee and represent the opinions of the members of each panel in the context of their individual charges. The following subject areas are covered: radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, optical/IR from ground, UV-optical from space, interferometry, high energy from space, particle astrophysics, theory and laboratory astrophysics, solar astronomy, planetary astronomy, computing and data processing, policy opportunities, benefits to the nation from astronomy and astrophysics, status of the profession, and science opportunities

2022-2023 Program and Abstracts: Celebration of Student Scholarship

The 2022-2023 Program and Abstracts for the Celebration of Student Scholarship at Morehead State University held on April 19, 2023. A Showcase of Student Research, Scholarship, Creative Work, and Performance Arts.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/celebration_posters_2023/1046/thumbnail.jp

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference : February 18-20, 2010, Boulder, Colorado

Lunar and Planetary Institute, Universities Space Research Association, Commercial Spaceflight Federation, Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation, NASA Ames Research Center, Southwest Research Institute, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Special Aerospace Services, The National AeroSpace Training and Research Center (NASTAR Center), United Launch Alliance, Virgin Galactic, SpaceRef.coM, Masten Space Systemsconveners, S. Alan Stern ... [and others] ; scientific organizing committee, S. Alan Stern ... [and others]PARTIAL CONTENTS: New Shepard Vehicle for Research and Education Missions--SpaceX DragonLab: A Platform for Longer Duration Microgravity Experimentation--eSpace: The Center for Space Entrepreneurshi​p--Convergence of Space Tourist Processing and Suborbital Payload Processing in Spaceport Facility Design--Planetary Science from a Next-Gen Suborbital Platform: Sleuthing the Long Sought After Vulcanoid Asteroids