The production team of the movie used Red Hat

Nov 24, 2014 15:31 GMT  ·  By

The Interstellar movie has been released not long ago and it was an instant success, despite some of the criticism that has been expressed by a number of physicists. To make thinks even more interesting, at least for Linux users, it looks like the production team used Linux to built the black hole in the movie.

It's not really a secret that the scientific community is mostly using Linux for their work and the same applies for production studios that work on movies.

Most of the time, they are employing specific software and we don't get to see a lot from backstage. And, to be fair, not a lot of people are interested in seeing what operating system or what tools have been used for a specific movie.

That's usually true, unless you are a Linux fan. And if you are, you can't get enough of spotting Linux distros in all kind of interesting situations, whether it's for scientific purposes or for any other kind of project.

Some of you might think that big studios are probably using powerful Mac OS X workstations or other operating system whose name we won't mention, but the truth is that that happens less often than you think.

The Interstellar wormhole was designed on Linux

One of the story pillars for Interstellar was the black hole. The producers and the director, Christopher Nolan, wanted to be as accurate as possible, so they enlisted the help of physicist Kip Thorne, who is an established figure in the scientific community. They eventually built the wormhole that you get to see in the movie, and they even made a few scientific discoveries along the way.

One of the main challenges of rendering a wormhole was the fact that it's actually a 3D object. Movies have taught us, wrongly, that wormholes look in a certain way, but Interstellar actually shows the best rendition of one.

The Discovery Chanel had a special show called The Science Of Interstellar, which was narrated by the main actor in the movie. In one of the scenes you can see some of the production team working on the wormhole and they are running a Red Hat system. Some of the other scenes also feature Red Hat, so it looks like the producers actually used Linux do to some of the most important stuff.

In the video below, check after the 16-minute mark if you want to skip straight to the Linux part. If you happen to spot Linux in other movies, don't be shy and leave a comment below.

Update: A Reddit user correctly noticed that it's not Red Hat in the images, but CentOS. It's still Linux, so the story hasn't changed much.

Science of Interstellar (7 Images)

Red Hat in Interstellar
Christopher Nola and Kip ThorneThe wormhole in Interstellar
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