Did Interstellar's black hole visualization actually contribute to real science?

The answer

For Interstellar (2014), director Christopher Nolan recruited Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to ensure scientific accuracy. Visual effects studio Double Negative wrote entirely new rendering software that traced the paths of millions of light beams around a spinning black hole using Einstein's general relativity equations. The simulation, called 'Gargantua,' required 800 terabytes of data and up to 100 hours to render a single frame. The results revealed unexpected gravitational lensing patterns that Thorne had never predicted theoretically. This led to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity in February 2015. It was the first time a Hollywood film directly contributed to astrophysics research.