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An internet hysteria surrounding the ancient Mayan calendar caused fear that 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? The answer is definitely “no,” according to science research carried out by University of Leicester physics students. 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 center 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 needed in relation to the volume of the asteroid pieces, their density, the clearance radius (which was taken as the radius of Earth plus 400 miles), the asteroid’s pre-detonation velocity, and its distance from Earth at the point of detonation. 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. In other words, we would need to construct a bomb about a billion times stronger than the most powerful weapon ever built in order to save the world in this way. They also found that scientists would have to detect the asteroid much earlier if we were to have any chance of splitting the asteroid in time. On top of this, the asteroid would need to be split at almost the exact point that it could feasibly be detected at 8 billion miles. This would leave no time for Bruce to travel to the asteroid and drill into its center -- let alone share any meaningful moments with Ben Affleck or Liv Tyler along the way. “I really enjoyed the film ‘Armageddon’ and up until recently never really considered the plausibility in the science behind the movie. But after watching it back I found myself being more skeptical about the film in many area,” said student Ben Hall, 22, from Haverhill , near Cambridge . “I think that directors attempt to make films scientifically accurate but find that a lot of trouble is run into in what can and cannot be done, thus leading to falsification in the science to make movies more interesting or visually appealing to the audience,” he added. The science papers were published in this year’s University of Leicester Journal of Special Physics Topics.

Internet hysteria over asteroid doom