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Space has long been a central theme in science fiction. Movies set in space thrill us with the excitement of exploring the vast unknown, and thanks to modern CGI and filmmaking techniques, they’ve become a visual spectacle.
Even though space is a beloved topic in pop culture, Hollywood still gets many details wrong. You might expect us to have a solid understanding of space by now, but movies have led many of us to have a very skewed perception of what it's truly like.
We're not claiming that movies need to be entirely accurate, as fiction allows for a certain degree of creative liberty. However, our portrayal of space could be closer to the truth if screenwriters simply took a moment to check a few facts before drafting their scripts.
10. Explosions in Space
Witnessing a massive explosion in space on a giant high-definition screen is undeniably one of life's greatest thrills. While the visuals are stunning, the real question is whether such explosions could happen scientifically. On Earth, explosions appear as they do because of air and gravity. The air acts as an oxidizer, and the force of the blast pushes the explosion outward, eventually causing it to collapse back to the ground.
Explosions in space, however, would play out very differently (and be far more spectacular). Despite the lack of air, certain types of fuel can still act as oxidizers, creating some fire. But this fire would look unlike what we’re used to—it would expand into a growing ball of light due to microgravity and the absence of air resistance. It would also pose a threat to nearby spacecraft, as debris would keep expanding until it encounters something that halts it.
9. Black Holes Consume Everything Around Them
In movies, black holes are often shown as all-consuming vortexes of doom, dragging everything in their path with no hope of escape. This is the image most of us have, as we don’t have much else to base our understanding on—those physics books are far too difficult to digest.
If you read even a basic academic description of black holes, you’d quickly discover how greatly we’ve misunderstood them. They are no different from any other celestial body, with their gravitational pull being directly proportional to their mass. They cannot attract more than their size permits. If our Sun were to be replaced by a black hole of the same mass, nothing would change in the solar system—gravitationally speaking, at least, as the Sun is crucial in other aspects.
While it’s true that a black hole will consume everything near its event horizon, its gravitational effect on objects outside that radius (which is typically very small) would be just like any other massive object.
8. The Asteroid Belt Is Dense And Crowded
The asteroid belt separates the inner and outer planets of the solar system. As the name implies, it’s a ring of asteroids and other debris orbiting the Sun, and movies have long featured it. They often portray the belt as a dense area, filled with a thick cloud of rocks that must be skillfully navigated to pass through.
If that’s been your mental image of the asteroid belt, we hate to break it to you, but it’s highly inaccurate. The view from an asteroid in the belt would resemble the sky on Earth, considering the immense distances involved. Spacecraft passing through the belt face a very low risk of collision, as the asteroids are widely spaced apart.
7. Everything About Space Warfare
It’s understandable that we’d imagine space warfare based on Earthly battles, as that’s the only reference we know. Space conflicts often resemble the dogfights seen in World War II films, with spacecraft engaging in combat much like airplanes would on Earth.
While these cinematic battles are spectacular, they have little basis in scientific reality. Actual space combat would likely look nothing like what we see on screen, with warships designed to prevent decompression and withstand radiation, rather than focusing on aerodynamics. Traditional dogfighting strategies wouldn’t apply either. While general battlefield tactics from Earth-based wars—such as envelopment—might still be relevant, the movement and tactics of a real space conflict would be completely foreign to anyone familiar with Star Wars.
6. The Sun Is Yellow Because It’s Burning
Despite it being the main reason behind life on Earth, most of us still don’t get how the Sun actually works. We assume that it’s yellow in color, possibly because we think that it’s burning, and that’s what fire looks like. That also means that we don’t quite understand what makes the Sun produce so much heat, either.
For one, the Sun is not yellow at all and only looks to be because the Earth’s atmosphere gives it that yellow tint. Sunlight is pure white in color. More importantly, the Sun isn’t burning at all, at least not in the way we typically understand the word. Instead of an everlasting fire, the Sun’s heat comes from fusion reactions of various molecules in its core.
5. Planets Always Circle Their Stationary Suns
When we think of the various solar systems around the universe, we picture them exactly like ours. There’s a stationary star in the center, and—depending on whether the system has planets—various celestial bodies revolving around it in circles/ellipses, regardless of their sizes.
While that’s pretty much true for our cosmic neighborhood, in a solar system with more than one planet as big as, say, Jupiter (or bigger), their rotation would look very different, and you’d likely see the star in some kind of movement, too.
Gravity is a mutual force, meaning the Earth pulls on the Sun just as the Sun pulls on us. We don't perceive this because Earth's gravitational influence is minimal compared to that of the Sun. However, the situation is different for larger planets. In fact, Jupiter and the Sun orbit around a point in space located beyond the Sun's surface. This effect would be even more noticeable in systems with multiple giant planets like Jupiter. This is not the typical way we envision solar systems across the universe.
4. Laser Beams Are Visible
Laser weapons have been a fixture in sci-fi movies for a long time. As we approach the reality of deploying them on the battlefield, many people will likely be let down to discover that they are far from what films portray.
Essentially, a laser beam is a focused burst of energy that could serve various functions on the battlefield—something that filmmakers in space operas have utilized repeatedly. Unlike in the movies, though, real-life laser beams would be entirely invisible in space (unless they’re aimed directly into your eyes) due to the absence of particles to scatter the light.
3. Nothing In The Universe Can Go Faster Than The Speed Of Light
The speed of light is often considered an insurmountable boundary for humanity, as it’s typically regarded as impossible to surpass. While various theories speculate on what it would be like to break this barrier, none of our current equations account for traveling beyond it.
Interestingly, we already know of at least one thing in the universe that moves faster than the speed of light: the rate at which the universe itself is expanding. To the amazement of both scientists and amateur skywatchers, it was discovered that the universe is expanding faster than light—specifically, the relative motion between distant objects like galaxies. This phenomenon is still not well understood, but it’s clear that the expansion speed increases with distance, meaning the farther something is, the faster it recedes from us.
But that's not all—there’s theoretical scientific evidence suggesting the existence of particles that could exceed the speed of light. Although we haven’t yet observed these particles in the real world, many scientists believe that more entities capable of breaking the light barrier are out there, and it’s just a matter of finding them.
2. Sound In Space
The idea that we could hear the sounds of explosions in space is largely influenced by the space movies of the past century. However, this isn’t accurate; sound cannot travel in space because there is no air or vibrating molecules to carry it. And in a way, we should be grateful for that, because if sound could travel, we would constantly hear the sounds of the universe, including the ongoing thermonuclear explosions of our Sun.
Although modern media has improved its representation of real-life physics, the cliché of explosions in space making loud sounds still persists, as it tends to be more exciting visually than a silent explosion. Films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are notable exceptions for accurately depicting space’s silence, but they remain rare examples.
1. Weightlessness
It’s a common belief that there’s no weight in space, and it seems logical since gravity is absent. Many movies and shows support this idea, and videos showing people floating in space seem to suggest that they’re truly weightless.
While astronauts do experience what seems like weightlessness, it only occurs when they are in orbit around a large body, such as on the International Space Station (ISS). In reality, gravity is present everywhere in space, even if it’s very faint. You’re never completely weightless unless you are in a state of perpetual free fall around a celestial body, which is precisely what happens aboard the ISS. It’s curious why movies continue to depict space as a gravity-free zone, given that gravity is everywhere in space.
