Interstellar fans mindblown after finding out what the ticking sound was used for

Interstellar has to be one of the best sci-fi films of all time - and now fans have caught a tiny, heartbreaking detail in the film's soundtrack.

This space flick is so much more than a heart-breaking tale of hunting for a new habitat for mankind.

The film - which turned, erm, one-hour-old last year (IYKYK) - follows ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who is tasked to pilot a spacecraft along with a team of researchers to find a new planet for humans to live on after Earth becomes uninhabitable.

With Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan at the helm, attention to detail was always going to be a massive deal on the film.

Not only did director Nolan plant 500 acres of corn in a field to execute one shot in the movie, but he had also hired a renowned physicist to create equations which would create the realistic depiction of a black hole - which took 100 hours each frame to render.

There was also one thing that many fans missed when watching the feature - the ticking noise when the characters are on the watery Miller's planet.

If you completely missed the noise or thought you had been imagining it, fear not as it’s finally been explained.

Warner Bros

On Miller’s planet, the soundtrack in the background has a ticking sound that happens every 1.25 seconds.

However, now we know that every hour there equals seven Earth years, so each tick represents one day on Earth.

Think of how many ticks there are in the scene and you’ll realise how wild it is that the time difference between the main character and his daughter was right there in front of us all along.

But fans who have only just found out the meaning of the ticking have been utterly mind blown.

One person on TikTok praised the Nolan hit as the ‘best movie of all time’ while others were busy calculating their own maths to find out whether the movie got it right with how long Cooper was on the planet.

Someone else wrote: “My brain is big enough for this when I haven’t seen the movie. My brain is screaming that this isn’t how time works but I’m missing so much context.”

Another said: “This movie should’ve won every Oscar.”

But do you know what causes the time warp on the planet?

Paramount pictures

It’s down to time dilation, which is where time slows down under the influence of a strong gravitational field.

Not only is it influenced by gravity and motion, but it also leads to different experiences of time depending on the circumstances.

It’s so complex that it can result in one person experiencing a few seconds while another person sees everything in slow motion.

Such as Einstein's special relativity theory which states that the faster an object accelerates, the slower it moves through time.

So, gravity's pull affects the passage of time, and as Miller's planet is near a black hole, it’s experiencing time at a much slower rate compared to Earth.

Time to lie down in a darkened room, I think.

Topics: TV and Film, Christopher Nolan, Matthew McConaughey, Space, NASA, Science

Britt Jones