Physics students in a scientific paper dismantle the movie Armageddon

Almost everyone has assumed that the film and television writers are usually taken some liberties when writing or adapt their stories to enhance the drama or story may seem to us much more epic or dramatic. This type of license, whether historical, scientific or technical information are often targeted by criticism from the most sensitive by them, ie they see on the big screen some "outrageous" that plays full scope of work or specialty. A group of students specializing in physics has published a curious article that dismantles Armageddon , Michael Bay film starring Bruce Willis in that stop a meteor will hit Earth by detonating a nuclear bomb .

In 1998 two films of "disaster movie" agreed on the same topic: the impact of a meteorite into our planet and efforts to stop such a catastrophe. Both in Armageddon as Deep Impact , United States ("how could it be otherwise") put up missions to detonate nuclear bombs on meteorites and avoid disaster. However, this proposed solution in both films is coming down (which was expected because that is fiction) after the proposed mathematical analysis of three PhD students of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester .

In his article , these students show that the nuclear bomb needed to be able to deflect the meteor from the movie Armageddon would have been extremely powerful man, so far, has not built any way. In fact, comparing the most powerful pump known to man, the dreaded Big Ivan Soviet (50 Megatons) to conclude that a bomb would have required a billion times more powerful.

Based on a mathematical model to characterize the asteroid from the film (size, density, speed of movement and distance from Earth) based on data from the film, the group of students arrived at the curious result that would have required 800 free Terajoules billion energy (Big Ivan released energy of 418,000 terajoules). Put another way, with the current arsenal, had been necessary to detonate the bomb in the Kuiper Belt (between Neptune and Pluto) to the energy released would have deflected the asteroid from its direct path to Earth.

I enjoyed watching Armageddon but recently I began to wonder if the argument is sustained from a scientific point of view. [...] The directors try to make some films with scientific accuracy but when they encounter certain problems often seek scientific license to make films more interesting or shocking to the viewer

In fact, to influence further into the errors of the film, the team took as a reference to the Hubble Space Telescope to show that this instrument would have detected the meteor to 12,870 million miles away but would have been impossible to move to Bruce Willis and his team to that place and therefore would not be possible to save the Earth ...

Clearly, the film is entertaining but, of course, we must recognize that the study have been published is rather curious.