Hollywood has always loved the idea of alien invaders, but today’s sci-fi films — from Avatar to the [new movie] Prometheus, are increasingly science-based.

Astronomers have discovered more than 700 worlds orbiting nearby stars in the past two decades, and the moviegoing public is just getting the message about the new planets, say astronomers such as Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute. So, in a way, pop culture is reflecting science, including efforts such as NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which is looking to find more planets in their stars’ “habitable zone,” warm enough for liquid oceans, like Earth’s, that may be able to support life forms.

“I think the public has grasped the fact that planets out there are as common as cheap motels,” Shostak says, noting that our Milky Way galaxy alone contains 300 billion stars, including some with multiple planets. “If only one in 1,000 is in the habitable zone, that is still about a billion habitable planets in our galaxy,” he says.

Planetary scientist Kevin Hand of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was a science adviser to Prometheus and offered advice to Avatar’s team. He says top filmmakers, such as James Cameron and Ridley Scott, are paying increasing attention to the plausibility of the alien worlds they create. Moviemakers have long imagined alien worlds, for example the double-sunned Tatooine of Star Wars, but the latest ones “really listen to where science is headed today,” Hand says.

Through the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Science Entertainment Exchange program, which unites moviemakers with scientists, Hand was involved in technical discussions with the Prometheus team. “We needed a world to explore that would be habitable, but with a somewhat toxic atmosphere, which was an interesting exercise,” Hand says.

The result was a world called LV-223, which has water, but its air is too poisoned to easily breathe. That’s easy to imagine, because some stars with planets have trace metals, indicating their chemistry might differ from ours, along with signs of water in the dust disks around the stars that might be a source for water on the planets. LV-223 is the moon of a giant planet, resembling the easier-to-detect ones most often discovered by astronomers so far. The movie’s background materials call it a “cold and implacable environment (that) is more like hell than heaven.”

Without spoiling the movie for those who haven’t seen it, one idea central to the plot is the notion of aliens “seeding” life on Earth. (continued…)

© 2012 USA TODAY under contract with YellowBrix. All rights reserved.

Tim:

Article source: http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031001R3PFS9