In a not so typical movie review, “Copernicus” gives his view on Avatar from the perspective of a professor of astrophysics.
The writer mentions both what’s plausible and what’s not. He writes:
It is an interesting question as to whether planets around either Alpha Cen A or B could exist in stable orbits that would last for billions of years. You might think they couldn’t because the gravity of the other star would perturb any forming planet. However, simulations show that at least at Earth-like distances, stable planets can form in that system.
Good! Au contraire:
In one of my biggest pet peeves regarding the science of Avatar, there is one scene where the gas giant, Polyphemus, can clearly be seen to be rotating in the span of about a second or two. Let’s say it rotates about a degree out of 360 degrees in those 2 seconds. That means it makes one rotation in 720 seconds, or 12 minutes! Jupiter takes about 10 hours to rotate. So the gas giant in Avatar rotates about 50 times faster than Jupiter. Winds on Jupiter can exceed 100 meters per second, so the winds on Polyphemus would have to exceed 5000 m/s – this is supersonic and clearly implausible. Here’s one case where Cameron opted for visual effect over realism, but to me the bargain isn’t worth it. It looks unrealistic and takes me right out of the movie.
Read the whole article here. Personally, I’ll try to stay away from astrophysics in fear of being “thrown out of” sci-fi too easily in the future.
