Spoilers: Short film review of ‘Gravity’

So I had heard good things about the movie “Gravity,” starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, and was excited to see it if for nothing other than the visual experience. Now that I actually have seen it, I can say that astounding visuals — and some decent but certainly not stellar acting — were about all this movie gave us. I mean, a movie that wins seven Academy Awards is at least worth one viewing, right?

Gravity-2Barely. Where to start? The movie had no semblance of a story. The only reason we had to care about Sandra Bullock’s character was that she had a daughter back home, except that she doesn’t have a daughter back home anymore. Her kid got killed in a freak accident on the playground. That’s totally plausible, right? Bullock was playing a character named Ryan Stone, and when Clooney asked about her seemingly masculine first name, we learn that Ryan’s parents wanted a boy. So, not only does Stone have reason to despair over her daughter, she’s got reason to despair over her own life. Frankly, halfway through the movie I found myself not caring one whit whether she made it back to Earth or not. At one point before the final sequence, she even resigned herself to give up the ghost and seemed satisfied to wait and die to the sound of an Asian parent singing a lullaby to a baby over the crackle of the intercom. Hell, burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere sounds like about the most exciting thing that could have happened to her at that point, but I digress.

Not only do we have no reason to care for Bullock, her character is completely inept — you know, from a technical standpoint — which for those paying attention, some technical skills with space technology might have come in handy 3 kilometers above Earth. We learn from her conversations with Clooney that Stone failed all of her re-entry simulation tests before coming onto the mission, so she had no business whatsoever in space, with or without a crew. When she finally reached the International Space Station after Clooney and the other crew member died, seemingly safe for a little while, she failed to inspect the interior of the craft and missed the fact that a couple wires had a short. Because of this oversight and in the ensuing fire and explosion, she lost most of the station and was relegated to a small pod in an attempt to reach a Chinese space station, her last hope to make it home.

If all that weren’t bad enough, at the end of the movie, after finally reaching the Tiangong, without having a clue what she’s doing — this might be a bad time to start reading the instruction manual — she somehow manages to start the engine, detach her pod and inexplicably initiate re-entry into Earth by randomly pressing buttons through a rousing game of eenie meenie miney mo. I wish I was joking.

And this from a flick that won seven Academy Awards? I guess storytelling isn’t requisite in movies anymore.

[rating:2/5]

Without the impressive visuals to save it, the rating would have been like -2.

Our daily universe: feeling gravity’s pull

It’s actually a little frightening when you consider that gravity, a force that we think is so strong on earth, is really not that strong at all. Because if it was even slightly less strong than it is, we might float out into the ether, and it is remarkable what subtle forces are needed to transcend the law of gravity:

We spend every day of our lives rooted to the Earth because of gravity, so it’s natural that most of us consider it a powerful force in the universe. Not so.

Think about it: The force of the entire Earth pulling down on a pin or a paperclip can be overcome with a small fridge magnet. Static electricity can make fabric and strands of hair stubbornly defy gravity — and all that takes is a short walk in a wool hat. Entire groups of people can be lifted off the ground for hours with a large balloon full of hot air. If gravity were as strong as the electromagnetic force, or the strong and the weak forces in an atomic nucleus, we’d all be a very finely distributed sludge over the surface of the earth.

Our daily universe: distant star explosion

Scientists recently witnessed the explosion of a Type 1a supernova that was born about 9 billion years ago. Type 1a supernovae are a specific kind of white dwarf star that occur only in binary system, in which two bodies are close enough to one another that they display gravitational interaction around the same center. Here’s a snippet from the article and a photo:

The team used the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe the supernova in near-infrared wavelengths over eight months.

“In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in optical light,” said principal investigator Adam Riess, of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “But it’s only the beginning of what we can do in infrared light.”

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), and S. Rodney (The Johns Hopkins University)

It’s raining metallic space junk

A news of the weird item for you. A hollow ball of metal has dropped from space down into the Namibian countryside, according to a report from the Agence-France Presse.

Credit: AFP

This is not a new occurrence. Apparently, numerous similar objects have fallen from space over the last 20 years in various locations around the globe. I did see that any locals were hurt in the incident, and the ball does not seem to pose any risk, although I don’t know what to make of the testimony that locals heard “explosions” several days beforehand.

Here is some more information:

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.

With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of “two halves welded together”.

It was made of a “metal alloy known to man” and weighed six kilogrammes (13 pounds), said Ludik.

It was found 18 metres from its landing spot, a hole 33 centimetres deep and 3.8 meters wide.

Several such balls have dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years, authorities found in an Internet search.

The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find.

Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger.

“It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first,” he said.

Our daily universe: more Kepler planets found

As I noted here, Kepler-22b was discovered earlier this month. Kepler-22c and Kepler-22d have also been found as part of the mission.

The announcement came today that too more planets have been discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. These two planets have been named, appropriately enough, Kepler-22e and Kepler-22f.

Here is a snippet from The New York Times’ article:

Astronomers said the discovery showed that Kepler could indeed find planets as small as our own and was an encouraging sign that planet hunters would someday succeed in the goal of finding Earth-like abodes in the heavens.

Since the first Jupiter-size exoplanets, as they are known, were discovered nearly 15 years ago, astronomers have been chipping away at the sky, finding smaller and smaller planets.

“We are finally there,” said David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who was a member of the team that made the observations, led by his colleague Francois Fressin. The team reported its results in an online news conference Tuesday and in a paper being published in the journal Nature.

You can learn more about Kepler here.

Our daily universe: Kepler-22b

Earlier this month, NASA’s Kepler mission found its first star orbiting in a habitable zone around a sun similar to our own. This is another important discovery because as we know and as I have pointed out before, any planet that can be found within the habitable, or “Goldilocks zone,” as it is otherwise called, has the potential to support life (as long as water is also present).

According to the article:

The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”

Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

Here are a couple illustrations of the planet and its orbit:

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech - This diagram compares our own solar system to Kepler-22, a star system containing the first "habitable zone" planet discovered by NASA's Kepler mission.