6 Myths Everyone Believes about Space (Thanks to Movies)

But that's just the way asteroid belts are, right? As C-3PO will tell you, the chances of successfully navigating an asteroid field are slim to none. It's basically a stampede, only instead of pissed-off cows, you're facing millions of huge murderous space boulders.

The Reality:

Here's a pic of the asteroid belt in our solar system. It kind of looks just like the one from Star Wars:

And there are loads of asteroids in that belt, true enough -- it features about half a million asteroids that we know of. However, there are also lots and lots of miles for them to cross. Lots and lots. To the point that when NASA had to send a probe through it, their scientists said the odds of colliding with an asteroid were one in a billion. So basically Han could have blindfolded himself and steered through our asteroid belt with his dick, secure in the knowledge that the odds of hitting an asteroid in the middle of an asteroid belt aren't a whole lot higher than the odds of you hitting one while driving your car to the grocery store.

That sounds crazy looking at the picture up there, but no picture of space really conveys the distances. For instance, once upon a time, our asteroid belt had way more asteroids in it (about a thousand times more, in fact). Even if Han had to fly through that density of asteroids, he'd find that each asteroid has a mind-boggling 400,000 square miles to itself.

You could argue that maybe in the particular galaxy Star Wars takes place in they for some reason have superdense asteroid belts, but that's actually impossible -- the whole problem is that over time, the asteroids will disperse. If they were as close as the Star Wars belt, for instance, each time an asteroid bumped into another, they would go flying off into outer space, with nothing to stop them.

This means that actually getting hit by an asteroid in an asteroid belt is less a matter of not paying attention and more a matter of veering off course by a good couple of million miles. And actively trying to find an asteroid. And then somehow intercepting it at the perfect time, with the perfect velocity and the accurate trajectory. You'd need a hell of a space pilot with a hell of a death wish.

Of all the horrible space things out there, black holes are probably the best proof that the universe really hates us. They're invisible, they're ominous, they're huge and they hoover everything within light years into their incomprehensible void.

Because of this tendency to hose up everything in their vicinity, black holes are pretty much contractually obligated to appear in every sci-fi epic worth its salt. From the planet-Vulcan-destroying black hole in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek to the ones in Stargate SG-1 and Doctor Who, the black hole is consistently portrayed as an inescapable vortex of destruction, slurping at our universe through a straw.

The Reality:

Let's imagine you woke up tomorrow and found that somebody had replaced our sun with a black hole. And say the black hole is the same mass as our sun. What would happen?

Nothing, that's what.

OK, we'd all freeze to death because the sun is gone. There is that. But we certainly wouldn't get sucked in -- or even slowly fall in, flailing our hands comically.

While black holes are certainly frightening, they're not nearly as powerful as most people think. We forget that, as big as they are, they still have mass. This means that no matter how big and absurdly strong they might seem, they also have finite strength.

In other words, a black hole is just like every other object in the universe, in that its gravitational pull can only be as powerful as its mass allows it to be. If it's the mass of the sun, its pull is the same as the sun's. No more, no less. Physics is a thing even black holes have to obey. There is no special mechanism that makes it suck things in beyond regular ol' gravity, and gravity has to obey the same rules as everything else.

Say what you want about the universe, that last sentence makes us feel a bit better about it. It's comforting to know that even something that can drag time itself into the drain has to play by house rules.

The sun is yellow; that's one of the first things most kids learn about it, right after the whole "hot" thing but before the "horrific mass of nuclear hellfire" part. The color of the sun is one of the easiest things in the world to verify, if you don't mind your eyeballs catching fire after staring at it too long. Hell, even its classification is yellow dwarf.

Actually, we have a pretty good idea of what color the rest of our immediate space is, too. That's because we have plenty of visual material of our galactic 'hood, from the pictures provided by Hubble to numerous satellite images and the various probes roaming the solar system. That's how Hollywood knows what color the Martian sand under Arnold should be when he does the eye-bulge fandango in Total Recall.

The Reality:

At the risk of crushing the memory of every painting you had to make in grade school art class, the sun is not really yellow, nor is it engulfed in wavy flames. In fact, it doesn't really look like anything much. An intergalactic cue ball, maybe.

The reason the sun appears like it does to us is Earth's atmosphere, which makes its rays appear yellow-tinted. However, the temperature of the Sun is 6,000 degrees Kelvin, and any star of that particular temperature has only one color it can be: white.

Boring white, too. Here's a picture of the sun viewed from space, courtesy of NASA:

Yes, the sun looks like the moon, but without the face to make it interesting.

But what about the rest of our solar system? We're not dependent on our eyes when it comes to the colors of, say, Mars. We've got pictures. Hell, we had a Mars rover that was right there on the ground, it took snapshots of the red planet from inches away.

Actually, none of those cameras photograph in color. The color is added later, with filters.

It's not NASA's fault -- extraterrestrial photography is tricky, and the pictures that result do not necessarily represent the most accurate version of the subject. Instead, the scientists involved in the process tend to go for the combination of colors that help their work the most. Zolt Levay of the Space Telescope Science Institute says:

"The colors in Hubble images are neither 'true' colors nor 'false' colors, but usually are representative of the physical processes underlying the subjects of the images. They are a way to represent in a single image as much information as possible that's available in the data."

So, yeah. Basically, all those awesome pictures space research has been throwing our way for years are nothing but black and white images colored in to show how much science each part of the picture features. The Mars rover will send back this:

And NASA will run it through filters to approximate what the full color version would look like if you were actually there sitting on the rover:

But then you have to remember that Mars gets less than half as much sunlight as the Earth, and that said light is shining down through an atmosphere full of dust made of iron oxide (rust) particles. What we're saying is, the question of "What color is ________?" never has a simple answer when you're talking about outer space.

Although we realize this is not the most scientifically accurate of movies, that's the one scene they might have gotten right. Where a meteor lands, you'll find a charred, smoking crater. Right?

The Reality:

Said chunks of rock have been in the balls-shriveling cold of space (about 3 degrees above absolute zero) for billions and billions of years. When they enter the atmosphere, they're only there for a few minutes because of their extreme speed. This means that no matter what Michael Bay would have you believe, meteors just don't have the time to become all scorching hot and explodey before impact. In fact, they're usually just lukewarm when they hit.

But what about the fireball, then? Most everyone has seen a meteor shower, and those bastards are most definitely on fire.

In fact, the fireball has little to do with the actual physical meteor. The flames we see are the air in front of the object being compressed at incredibly high speeds by ram pressure. Basically, the meteor has a layer of air in front of it, surfing the shock wave it creates all the way down. That layer of air is what gets heated to the point of catching fire.

The phenomenon actually does manage to heat up the outer layers of the meteor somewhat, but since those always get blown off on impact, that doesn't really matter. So the next time a meteor lands, just go pick that shit up! Rub it on your face, it's fine.

We've all seen how it works in countless B-movies and low-budget sci-fi shows: If you go out there without a spacesuit, space will explode the shit out of you. The pressure inside you compared to the pressure outside you will turn you inside out in the blink of an eye. It made a guy's eyes pop out of his skull in Total Recall, and even Bart and Homer Simpson died this way during a Halloween episode.

Most people (correctly) assume that if the pressure outside an object is greater than the pressure inside, the object goes boom like a balloon in the upper atmosphere. So, if you take a human outside of the pressure of our atmosphere, after a few seconds, it's splat.

The Reality:

Actually, Stanley Kubrick got it right in 2001: A Space Odyssey when astronaut Bowman totally survives a space walk without a helmet. You wouldn't want to hang around all day -- you can't breathe, after all -- but your head isn't going to pop like a meat balloon, either.

Fortunately, humans have a bunch of things going for us that balloons don't. The main ones are our skin and circulatory system. The former does its job of containing and protecting our body so well it can actually negate the effect of explosive decompression.

Meanwhile, the latter can adapt to new environments so well that the blood keeps going just fine instead of instantly starting to boil. Even freezing isn't an immediate issue despite the cold environment, as there's not much matter in space to absorb your body heat.

In fact, the main dangers of being out of your suit in space are oxygen-related: breathing, naturally, and also holding air in your lungs, which leads into the lung-inflating trauma scuba divers get when surfacing too quickly from great depths.

Though that's not to say space won't kill your ass if you just decide to hang around wearing nothing but a respirator and a Speedo. It totally will. It just won't be as hilarious to watch.

Well, this one is basic astronomy, right? The moon has a dark side that catches less sunlight than the average ass. It's a freezing, dark wasteland that is eternally doomed to face away from the bringer of warmth that its other side is constantly graced by.

As a result, the dark side of the moon is a place of myth, mystery and fear in popular culture, equally useful for hiding ancient Transformer technology as it is for inspiring freaky, progressive music.

The Reality:

There isn't a dark side of the moon, any more than there's a dark side of the Earth. It's true that the moon is left with only one side facing the Earth at any given time. Facing Earth at any given time, not the sun.

Barring eclipses and other anomalies, this side of the moon gets exactly the same amount of light as the face side, just at different times (on Earth, scientists refer to this phenomenon as "night").

We just don't see it ourselves because it faces away from us. There is, after all, a "far side" of the moon, because the same part of the moon is always facing us. But that doesn't mean the other side is bathed in darkness; the whole myth of the dark side is humanity applying the same logic babies use when you put your face behind your hands: "Can't see it? Not there."

Go to space with Cracked and watch the trailer for our new Star Wars mini-series.

For more things Hollywood's got wrong, check out 6 Deadly Injuries You Think You'd Survive (Thanks to Movies) and 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies).

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