A scene from new UK sci-fi movie Sunshine, in which a group of scientists travel to the dying sun in a gigantic spacecraft with a dark-matter bomb the size of Kansas in order to save it - and humanity.
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'The day the sun went out' - fact or fiction?
8th March 2007
The sun is dying - not millions of years in the future, but right now. And mankind is dying with it.
Earth is dark all the time and growing darker and colder. Even the Amazon is solid ice. There are food shortages, few animals can survive, people rarely venture outside.
Soon the light will go out totally and we will die. Yet, there is a small chance we could be saved. A team of astronauts is heading towards the sun with a giant bomb to try to reignite it.
We take it for granted that it will always be there, but could the sun go out?
Sounds far-fetched, doesn't it? But then, this is the plot of a new movie, Sunshine, the latest collaboration between director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, the team that brought us the British horror film 28 Days Later.
But could there be any truth in Sunshine? It is a fact that the sun will not live forever. But this movie is set only 50 years in the future, and the sun has enough fuel left, we think, for about another five billion years. So, that makes the film pure fiction... or does it?
One eminent scientist, Dr Brian Cox, who was a consultant on the film, says not necessarily. And he should know. He is a highly respected Royal Society University Research Fellow, based at the School of Physics and Astronomy at Manchester University.
He is working on the Atlas experiment - a huge project looking at the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe - at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, in Geneva.
Here, he explains why he believes Sunshine isn't necessarily pure fiction. He says:
From a scientific perspective, it should be said that the sun dying out in the near future is hugely unlikely. But it is also true that there is a lot about the universe we do not understand.
During the past few years astronomers have observed that there is extra 'stuff' in the universe that we can see only by its gravitational influence on stars and galaxies.
This stuff goes by the name of 'dark matter', and there is five times as much dark matter in the universe as there is normal matter, the stuff that makes up you, me, and the stars and planets we can see with our telescopes.
What is this mysterious stuff ? It's possible, some scientists would even say likely, that this stuff is made of particles known as supersymmetric particles, a new and exotic form of matter that is high on the list of potential discoveries at CERN's giant Large Hadron Collider, a machine, 27km in circumference, which begins operations this year after almost a decade of construction.
Theoretical physicists have spent many years calculating the properties of these supersymmetric particles, and we have a reasonable theoretical understanding of how they might behave.
One possibility is that they could clump together into giant balls known as Q-balls. If this is true, then these heavy and exotic objects could have been made billionths of a second after our universe began, and still be roaming the universe today.
It is speculated that, if a Q-ball drifts into the heart of a super-dense object such as a neutron star - a very compact, dying star that is one stage away from becoming a black hole - it could begin to eat away at its 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. So what would happen if a Q-ball drifted into our sun's core?
The sun is not a neutron star, and is not nearly as dense as one. In fact, it's likely that the sun is many times too diffuse to stop a Qball - it would power right through.
But maybe, just maybe, 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. If this did happen, the sun would start fading away, just as it does in the film, leaving us with an Earth growing colder and darker.
It's far-fetched, but we have a saying in physics that anything that isn't explicitly ruled out is therefore possible, so in the final analysis, you never quite know.
• Sunshine is released in the UK on April 5.
dailymail.co.uk
Thanks for the heads up.
