Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Europa Report
Just watched this. Entertaining, well done sci-fi film involving a doomed expedition to Europa. Excellent CGI, good acting. I don't like flashbacks much and this is an example. Overall, very good science. One error. Just landed on Europa; reporting absolute zero as the temperature. Nope. Europa is close enough to Sun to be well above that temperature, even if Europa wasn't being heated by tidal friction from Jupiter. Tidal friction is likely the cause of Europa having a liquid ocean, a big part of the plot.
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Given the cosmic microwave background temperature (2.7255K, according to Wikipedia), nothing in the universe is at absolute zero.
ReplyDelete(This also means that you won't find ponds of superfluid helium on even the coldest of bodies, since the lambda point, at which liquid helium transitions to the superfluid state, is 2.1768K, meaning the universe is more than half a degree too warm to allow this.)