PHYSORG
An artist’s animation illustrates a massive asteroid belt in orbit around a star the same age and size as our Sun. Scientists have dismissed adventure films like ‘Armageddon’ where the hero uses a nuclear bomb to save Earth from a giant asteroid, as too little science and a lot of fiction.
According to the internet hysteria surrounding the ancient Mayan calendar, an asteroid could be on its way to wipe out the world on December 21, 2012.
Obviously this is pretty unlikely – but if an asteroid really is on its way, could we take a cue from the disaster movie Armageddon in order to save the planet? According to science research carried out by University of Leicester physics students, the answer is definitely “no”. In the 1998 film, Bruce Willis plays an oil-drilling platform engineer who lands on the surface of an Earth-bound asteroid, drills to the centre and detonates a nuclear weapon, splitting the asteroid in half. The two pieces of the asteroid then pass either side of the Earth, saving the planet’s population from annihilation. But the group of four MPhys students worked out that this method would not work, as we simply do not have a bomb powerful enough. Students Ben Hall, Gregory Brown, Ashley Back and Stuart Turner found that the device would need to be about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth – the Soviet Union’s 50 megaton hydrogen bomb “Big Ivan” – in order to save the world from a similar sized asteroid. To do this, they devised a formula to find the total amount of kinetic energy (E) needed in relation to the volume of the asteroid pieces (??r3), their density (?), the clearance radius (R) which was taken as the radius of Earth plus 400 miles, the asteroid’s pre-detonation velocity (?1) and its distance from Earth at the point of detonation (D). Armageddon looming? Bruce Willis couldn’t save us from asteroid doom (Update) Using the measurements and properties of the asteroid as stated in the film, the formula revealed that 800 trillion terajoules of energy would be required to split the asteroid in two with both pieces clearing the planet. However, the total energy output of “Big Ivan” only comes to 418,000 terajoules.
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