"Sunshine": The Voyage to Save to Sun --A New SF Film Classic?
Our Sun is dying. Earth lies frozen.
It seems that in just fifty or so years our Sun will darken; the future of humanity relies on a ragtag group of astronauts and scientists packed aboard a spaceship named ‘Icarus II’ armed only with a giant deflector shield and a huge bomb – a bomb designed to reignite the Sun, effectively creating a mini-Big Bang.
We get to travel with the crew as they chart the course of the ‘missing presumed dead Icarus 1’ that disappeared without trace some years before while also attempting to plant a bomb on the Sun. En route the crew senses that there might be an unseen presence lurking in the claustrophobic quarters of Icarus II, or is it our imaginations conjuring up images of Alien?
As the Icarus II approaches Mercury and they lose radio contact with
earth, they pick up a distress signal from Icarus I, the ship which
disappeared from the same mission seven years earlier. The crew argues
about whether to ignore the signal or to respond – Mace and the
Captain, Kaneda , argue that their mission is to deliver the bomb,
nothing more, and though Cassie (tries to reason with them, she is
over-ruled. But when a terrible, tragic accident means that Icarus I
may be their only hope of success – and with so much resting on them -
their course is set…
Could it be possible for the Sun to die much sooner than it predicted 5 billion year remaining lifespan? This is the theme of Danny Boyle's (29 Weeks Later, Trainspotting) new science-fiction thriller, Sunshine. A film many say could be the great new SF classic -a new 2001-A Space Odyssey. Building on the work of such stellar predecessors as Stanley Kubrick ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and Ridley Scott ("Alien"), Boyle has extended the visual vocabulary of the space-ship thriller by sending his astronauts not to the moon, or to Mars, but to the sun.
From a scientific perspective, it should be said that the chances of the Sun expiring in the next fifty to a hundred years or so are almost nil. But, it is also true that in many recent cases, the universe seems to imitate science fiction.
Keep in mind that about 800 to 600 million years ago the greatest ice age in the history of Earth occurred, the Cryogenian, which may have produced a "Snowball Earth" -an Antarctic-like shell of ice that covered the planet, believed due to a fall in solar radiation of about six percent.
Many current, accepted facts about the Sun were once in the realm of science fantasy and speculation. For example, six hundred million neutrinos, which are produced in nuclear reactions that power the sun pierce your body every second of every day passing through your body without a trace. The empirical proof of neutrinos occurred 20 years after it was proposed and well after its acceptance by the world's scientific community.
Theoretical physicists have suggested that one possibility is that super-symmetric particles could clump together into giant balls known as Q-balls. These heavy and exotic theoretical objects could have been made billionths of a second after our Universe began, and still be roaming the Universe today.
Brian Cox, a physicist at Europe's CERN, home of the LHC and consultant to Sunshine has speculated that, if a Q-ball drifts into the heart of a super-dense object such as a neutron star or our Sun, it could begin to eat away at it's core like a cancer, until the star is no longer massive enough to maintain itself and explodes in a violent explosion. Such explosions, known as gamma ray bursts, are seen in the Universe, although their cause is as yet unknown.
Each Q-ball is like a new universe "in a nutshell." Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an awesome cosmic explosion.
Finding Q-ball footprints would resolve a host of cosmic mysteries, including the nature of much of the dark matter that astronomers are convinced pervades the Universe, and perhaps the origin of the brilliant but unpredictable gamma-ray bursts.
If heavy Q-balls did form in the early Universe, they would still be around today. In that case, they could make up at least some of the unidentified dark matter that loiters around galaxies all over the Universe. We know this dark matter is there because its gravity distorts the paths of visible stars and galaxies.
Could such a dangerous, exotic object drift into the Sun's core and cause it to stop shining?
That is the premise of Danny Boyle's new science-fiction thriller, Sunshine, opening in the U.S. this month. It is likely that the Sun is many times too diffuse to stop a Q-ball - it would power right through. But is always remote possibility that some strange exotic form of matter from the earliest times in the universe could settle deep within the Sun's core, and disrupt its function enough to cause the catastrophic scenario seen in Sunshine.
Brian Cox Discusses the Science Behind the Film
Source Link (Article by Brian Cox CERN Physicists and Sunshine Consultant)
Mystery of Dark Matter -A Video
I watched JEOPARDY one time in my life and this was one of the questions: This gas surrounds Uranus and gives it a greenish color.
Answer: Methane
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
If the Sun dies, let's just light a match at Uranus!
Posted by: juantuffgai | July 13, 2007 at 09:31 AM