Cut it to half the initially measured size, and you get around 300 km / s, or 19 minutes 20 seconds.īut wait again! As the BMF comes in for landing, a plasma front develops in front of it as it pushes through the atmosphere. That size reduces its speed to around 450 km / s, which adds another three minutes to the trip, for a total of 12 minutes 54 seconds. Let’s say it’s about two-thirds the previously-claimed dimensions that would make it about 430 km by 550 km. And anyway, that means it left the Moon slower than its impact velocity, granting even more time.)īut wait! The BMF is closer to the camera’s viewpoint than the Earth’s limb, which means it’s probably smaller than first assumed. If you’re already traveling at 600 km / s, another km / s or three isn’t going to move the needle all that much. (Yes, it’s true that the mutual gravitational attraction between Earth and the BMF would have sped it up a bit, but at these speeds, the difference would be negligible. Assuming it somehow stayed intact after being instantly accelerated to such speeds, that is. (In the cross-section we can see, that is.) As it happens, the BMF takes about one second to move its own width across the screen, which means a speed of about 600 km / s.Īt that speed, it should have taken 580 seconds, or 9 minutes 40 seconds, to reach Earth. I did a sizing comparison using a full-Earth image, and determined the BMF is approximately the size of Germany: 650 km by 800 km. In the impact scene, the Earth’s limb is notably curved. Which leads us to the next set of problems: the observed movement of the BMF is nowhere close to that, and the visible effects aren’t consistent with its size or its movement.
Maybe someone who’s good with matter and energy can leave a comment.īut again, remember, we’re talking about speeds in the vicinity of 3,000 km / s. I’m not even sure it will leave you with solid matter, but I’m not inclined to do that math. I don’t care how massive a fragment of the Moon got ejected, instantly accelerating it to ~0.01 c is not going to leave you with one large chunk. Even if we assume there was some editing lossage and its traversal time was a half-minute longer, at 140 seconds, we get 2,488 km / s, which is about 0.83% c. That is just a hair over 1% the speed of light in a vacuum. Moving that far in 110 seconds means a speed of 3,166 kilometers per second ( km / s). This means the Big Moon Fragment (hereafter BMF) has to cover 348,283.8 kilometers. And what the heck, even though it makes no physical sense, let’s be overly generous and subtract the Moon’s 1,738.1 km equatorial radius. (Perigee is a measurement between the centers of mass of the two bodies, not their surfaces.) The Earth has an Equatorial radius of 6,378.1 km. The ejected fragment doesn’t have to traverse that entire distance, though it only has to reach the Earth’s surface. Assume Vanya accidentally zapped La Luna at its moment of perigee, which is 356,400 kilometers. How fast? Well, let’s find the slowest possible case. That ejected Moon fragment takes, according to the Netflix video player clock, just under 110 seconds to get from the Moon to the Earth. And they most certainly wouldn’t drop back and then speed up to match velocity with the parent body like some kind of magical space fairy dust.īut that arguably artistic problem aside, let’s talk about the problem of distance. Anything that “fell off” would fly in close formation with its parent body, slowly drifting further away but moving at the same velocity.
There’s no atmosphere in space to cause things to fall off and slow down. You know all the coolio particle trails behind the BMF and tails behind the other impactors? Yeah, no.
Here’s a link directly to the video file (MP4, no audio). The video couldn’t be loaded inline for some reason. And then, a little less than two minutes later, this. So, Vanya bleaches out, bad plans are executed, the sound of a gunshot somehow nullifies Vanya instead of charging her even further, magic energy beam somehow hits the Moon. And in order to do that, I’m going to deploy, for the first time ever, a WordPress Spoiler Cut™ on this here blog o’ mine, because this post is spoilerrific. I have to get into why the ending, the very last few minutes of season one, just didn’t work for me.
I thought it was pretty good! It was a decent mix of good decisions and bad decisions by people in the story, I liked most of the characters and their portrayals, and I thought the narrative arcs came to good places. Not long ago, Kat and I got around to watching The Umbrella Academy’s first season on Netflix.