Note: Spoiler alert for those that haven’t seen the movie!
Within the Interstellar universe, there exists an enormous black hole in a distant galaxy, named Gargantua by the movie’s characters. Around this black hole orbits several different planets, and the characters are hoping to explore and learn more about them. One of these planets, known as Miller’s Planet, orbits closely around this black hole to the point where the spacetime is warped heavily. A single hour on Miller’s Planet is equal roughly 7 years of Earth time.
Those are scary numbers. Really scary.
But in my opinion, there’s an equally scary implication because of this warped time frame, albeit much more subtle.
As we’ve learned in class, high tides and low tides are caused by the gravitational pull of objects rotating around each other. Earth has 2 major sources that pull on its tides: the sun and the moon. As Earth rotates, any single point on Earth effectively “passes through” the tidal bulges twice in a single rotation of the planet.
Similarly, in the movie, Miller’s Planet has a single source of enormous gravity: the black hole, Gargantua. Not only does the close proximity to the black hole cause an extreme warping of spacetime… but it also results in a very strong gravitational pull on its tides.
That gravity pulls nearly all of the water on the planet into two enormous bulges, and those bulges are the “high tide” of the planet. Every time the planet spins on its axis, any one point on the planet’s surface experiences those high tides twice.
And the remember the scary thing that I mentioned earlier?
Miller, the person the planet was named after, had been broadcasting from the planet for the entirety of the characters’ journey – roughly 10 years. Everyone thought she was alive. However, when the characters arrived on the surface of the planet, it was very clear that she had died. All of her equipment was broken and in shambles.
Remember, on this planet, 1 hour = 7 years.
In the scene, you can see a tidal wave receding into the horizon, right as the second tidal wave comes into view from the opposite direction. Miller had only been broadcasting for 10 years. If we do the math, it is very likely that Miller was killed in the tidal wave that we see receding.
She had probably only died a few minutes before the characters arrived at the planet.
Hello, Universe. 
I loved this post!! One of my absolute favorite movies, and I can’t believe I never thought of this detail in the film before. What an intriguing analysis using topics we’ve covered in class to better understand the science behind Interstellar!
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I’m glad you liked it! At the time Interstellar came out, I watched a bunch of videos talking about the scientific accuracy of the movie, and this was one of the big things that people talked about. Only later did I realize the implication with Miller, and it was definitely mind-boggling when it first hit me!
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Certainly a rather frightening and wonderful application of the impact of gravity on the planet. I haven’t seen the movie, but I looked up the planet and found that the tidal waves they see closely resemble a pheonoma known as a tidal bore, where an incoming wave goes against the direction of the current in a body of water.
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Great post! This is a chilling little tidbit that is very easy to overlook. Would you expect the transmission to be affect the intense gravity Miller had sent, and in what way?
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