THE SUN: THE FACTS
by Dr. Brian Cox
Our Sun is a nuclear fusion reactor the size of a million Earths. The Sun's powerhouse is its core, an incredibly violent place where the temperature rises to 15 million degrees, and a one square metre cube of core material would weigh 150 tons (150,000 kg). In this giant nuclear fusion reactor, atomic nuclei of hydrogen are smashed together and fused into helium. If only 1 kilogram of hydrogen were converted into helium in this way, enough energy would be released to satisfy the needs of 600 Americans for one year.
The Sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. Put another way, 4 hundred million million million million million million hydrogen nuclei are converted into helium every second (that's 38 noughts). In this process, over 4 million tons of the Sun's mass vanishes every second, converted into energy via Einstein's famous equation E=mc2. This is equivalent to exploding one hundred thousand million megatons of TNT per second. At this rate, it has enough fuel left for around 5 billion years, at which point it will die.
The Sun today is made up of 74% hydrogen, 25% helium, and small quantities of other, heavier elements. These heavy elements seem negligible, but, in fact, the only place they can be made in the Universe is deep inside the hearts of stars. Just after the Big Bang, the only elements present in the Universe were hydrogen, helium and very small amounts of a handful of the lighter elements, but crucially no carbon, oxygen or iron. Everything in your body today, except the hydrogen, was cooked inside generations of ancient stars, and thrown back into the Universe when those stars ran out of hydrogen fuel and died a spectacular death known as a supernova explosion.
The Sun is a third generation star, which formed around 4.5 billion years ago, a time when the Universe was already around 9 billion years old -- enough time for two previous generations of stars to have lived and died. The Sun, planets and everything we see around us, including ourselves, formed from giant clouds of dust and gas thrown out into space during the deaths of these early stars.
The Sun seems to be unique, and overwhelmingly important to us, but is, in fact, one of more than a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy alone, and there are at least a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable Universe. So the Sun isn't very special. In fact, as stars go, it's pretty small and unremarkable. A familiar star to anyone who looks up at the night sky is Betelgeuse in Orion (the bright red star, the ninth brightest in the sky). If our Sun were replaced with Betelgeuse, all the planets up to and including Jupiter would be inside the star! Its radius is 6,500 times that of our little Sun.
In SUNSHINE, the Sun's inevitable demise happens not in 5 billion years, but during the 21st century. How could this be? While we have a reasonably sound and well-tested picture of the inner workings of stars, there are certainly things in the Universe we do not understand. Where I work at CERN in Geneva, a new 27 km-long machine called the LHC will be switched on this year. It will recreate the conditions that were present in the Universe less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. In these early times, a host of strange things could have been created, and these as yet undiscovered objects could still be flying through the Universe today. It is just possible that these objects could cause havoc if they drift into the heart of a Star.
Many physicists believe that a new family of particles called Supersymmetric particles might be discovered at the LHC. They are a strong candidate for Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff discovered by Astronomers that makes up a much larger fraction of the mass in the Universe than the familiar families of particles that make up the Earth, the Sun and indeed everything we can see, including our own bodies. Many Supersymmetric theories allow for objects known as Q-balls to exist. These can be pictured as giant agglomerations of Supersymmetric particles that could, if they drifted into the heart of a star, eat away like a cancer, eventually destroying the star from within. This might be far-fetched, but it is allowed by certain theories of the sub-atomic world.
What is certainly true is that our position on the fragile Earth is far from secure. We live in a violent Universe that we do not fully understand, and we may one day be called on to launch an Icarus mission to prevent life on our planet being destroyed by a natural phenomenon over which we have little or no understanding or control.

SOLAR INFO
The Sun's circumference: 4.4 million km
Surface Area: 11,900 times that of Earth
Surface Gravity: 28 g - meaning you would weigh 28 times more on the surface of the Sun than you do on Earth
Surface temperature: Around 5500 degrees C. Diamond has the highest melting point of any known substance at 3550 degrees C.
The Sun rotates once every 25.38 Earth days.
The Sun contains over 99.8% of the mass of the entire Solar system. The planet Jupiter contains most of the rest.
Sunspots are cooler regions of the Sun's surface. They are cold because strong magnetic fields prevent the heat rising up from the interior to the surface. Sunspots can be many thousands of kilometres across, and are often associated with solar flares and coronal mass ejections that throw huge amounts of material out into space. Sunspot activity follows an 11-year cycle. When there are fewer sunspots, the Earth's climate tends to be colder. During the 17th century, the sunspot cycle appeared to stop for several decades. This lack of solar activity, called the Maunder minimum, coincided with the "little ice age", during which temperatures in Europe were so cold that the river Thames in London regularly froze over during the winter. There is now evidence that much longer-term cycles occur, over periods of up to 100,000 years. These long-term cycles may be linked to the Earth's ice ages. The Sun may not be as stable as it looks.
The solar wind is a stream of particles emitted from the Sun (mainly protons and electrons). These particles stream past the Earth at between 200 and 800 km per second. The Sun loses a million tonnes of material per second in the solar wind.

FASHIONING THE FUTURE
Charged with giving celluloid life to Boyle and Garland's vision of a near-future space mission were director of photography Alwin Küchler (PROOF, CODE 46), production designer Mark Tildesley (28 DAYS LATER, MILLIONS), editor Chris Gill (28 DAYS LATER, MILLIONS), Academy Award®-winning makeup and hair designer Christine Blundell (TOPSY-TURVY, THE CONSTANT GARDENER), and costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb (A FOREIGN AFFAIR) who would design the costumes. The visual effects were created by London-based the Moving Picture Company, headed up by visual effects supervisor Tom Wood.
Boyle worked closely with director of photography Küchler to create the film's distinctive look. "Visually it is very important that the film is unusual cinematically," Boyle explains. "When they approach the sun the question of the balance of light was key, and Alwin is a great cinematographer for that challenge."
For Küchler, it was only when he started prepping SUNSHINE that he began to realize quite how difficult it was going to be, working with an element as dominant, beautiful and powerful as the Sun itself. "I could never ever compete with the beauty of the real Sun," explains Küchler who shot the film in Anamorphic. "One of the things I wanted to get across was the physical sense of light. The whole spaceship is designed around the fact that it's being protected from the Sun. On one side you have the gold shield, which reflects all the sunlight away, and on the other side you have absolute darkness. We shot certain sequences in a very dark environment, which you get used to, so when the Sun plays a role we wanted the audience to have a physical reaction to it. If you were to take just a teaspoon of the material that makes up the Sun and place it on top of St Paul's Cathedral, the whole of England would be vaporized. Imagine that scale and how you transfer that to celluloid. It made me very aware of the limitations when competing with that power."
To create the interiors and exteriors of the Icarus II, Boyle reunited with award-winning production designer Mark Tildesley who had worked with him on 28 DAYS LATER and MILLIONS. "Mark is a genuine creative person and, like me, loves photography books which was a great language for us to work through," Boyle explains. "We knew the parameters, and that it was going to be more NASA than Star Wars in terms of the balance. So NASA was a great influence."
Adds Macdonald, "Once it was decided it was going to be set in the nearer future, the concept for the design came from reality. To get that reality for the film a lot of the ideas for the design were inspired by the research we did involving nuclear submarines, oil-rigs, and, of course, NASA. We learnt that on a Space Shuttle every single screw has a number and a fitting and that is the only screw that can go into that hole and we wanted to get some of that level of detail into the film."
As with previous films Boyle collected a portfolio of images and visual references for SUNSHINE which he made available to both cast and crew. His brief to Tildesley was to design the Icarus II with the sense of it being an organic, living thing that could break down and would need to be fixed. "We wanted to make the ship very real and believable for the audience so they would buy into the mission," Tildesley explains. "We also wanted the actors to feel that they could have been living in this confined space for months on end. We talked about not using 'space funk', meaning beautiful things for the sake of it, and more about beauty in science, so that meant finding a beauty in that reality. We also made a policy that, in terms of the way we look at our set, we are not reinventing everything. In that sense, we are imagining there are still elements of our world that people would recognize."
The Icarus II consisted of a massive shield, a mile in diameter, made up of gold panels, which protects the ship from the sun by deflecting the Sun's heat away from the ship. Behind the shield sits the bomb, the size of Manhattan, and of equal mass to the Moon. In comparison to the shield and the bomb, the living quarters were very confined, consisting of a main corridor that ran the length of the ship. Off this corridor branch the social area, the sleeping quarters, the flight deck, the observation room, the med centre, the Earth room and the oxygen garden.
Based at Three Mills Studios in the East of London, the production took up more than eight soundstages on which Tildesley built all the Icarus II interiors as complete 360-degree environments. "There is a mix of contrast of scales," he explains. "The ship in our terms is enormous and within that ship there are tiny spaces for the living quarters, much as you would find on a submarine. You have something with real machines with practical functions. In the living quarters we had the wiring and leads running across the bedrooms and throughout the corridors so there is a sense that you could see the veins of the ship, to show that it is living and working all the time."
"The sets are amazing," says Evans. "I mean, it's so nice to be able to have things that are tangible, and to be able to run around a spaceship that's actually there, and it's not just half of a spaceship or three quarters of a spaceship. You're in space on a spaceship. You're running through hallways and into different social areas and bedrooms and medical centers. It really helps bring the film to life."
Chosen for her skills in both costume and production design, Suttirat Larlarb, who had worked in the art department on THE BEACH, was brought on board to devise a new kind of space suit as well as the crew's costumes. "We wanted the space suit to be very unusual and different, to break away from the more traditional, more conventional suits that you always see in space films," says Boyle. "Suttirat's sense of taste and her flamboyance in terms of her visual ideas made her the right person for the job."
"The spacesuit needed to be a costume with its own specific technical requirements, almost like a vehicle or a prop," explains Larlarb. "Danny's brief was to design the suit so that it is based on logic and did not look too far-fetched. The suit had to be flexible and durable and look like it would give protection against radiation and the Sun." Both Boyle and Larlarb looked at many and far-ranging reference sources, from the designs of Issey Miyake to Samurai warriors, from medieval suits of armor to deep-sea diving suits, even referring to the hood worn by the character of Kenny in the animated series South Park, before settling on a look for the space suit.
Once the space suit's design was locked in, Larlarb handed over her reference material and sketches to costume fabrication supervisor James Enright and his team for the manufacturing process. "Space suits in real life are quite restricting and the team was conscious of creating as much movement in the suit as possible," Enright explains. "We developed rings that interlock with each other around the legs, arms and the wrists, so in theory you can run in it which you can't really do in a real space suit."
When looking for a material for the suits, Boyle fell in love with a gold substance called Mylar, which is much like the insulating foil that runners use to keep warm. "From pre-light and wire rehearsals we wrapped the stunt team in it," Enright says. "Danny loved the way the material reflected and bounced light around. It gave the small subtle movement of space walking real energy."
The main point of difference between the SUNSHINE space suit and others of its kind, apart from its gold color, was the idea of a large protecting hood that all but covered the wearer's face, with visibility via a small, rectangular slit at the front of the helmet. "The idea of the large projecting hood evolved because it would be necessary for protection from light, heat and radiation. You could only just see the eyes of the astronaut as they needed shielding from the harmful rays of the Sun," says Larlarb. "The character has to be able to see out of the helmet but you would not be able to see into the suit. So we came up with this idea of putting the camera inside the helmet so you could stay with the actor on an emotional level," explains Boyle.
"'Helmet cam' was another one of Danny's wonderful creations," says Murphy. "It was physically tough because the helmet and camera combined weighed a ton, but those scenes do look believable on screen because lot of the time we are genuinely sweating and out of breath."
While the interiors of the Icarus II were built on stage, its exteriors were all created using computer-generated imagery by the visual effects team at the Moving Pictures Company. "When making a film you spend what seems like an eternity shooting it and then when you stop you normally come to the part of the process where you can edit it together and you have a film. In this case you don't. What you have is effectively a three-legged dog because the visual effects are not there," says Boyle. "The current taste is that you don't go the CGI route, you try and do it for real, but it is not even a question of that for this film. You have to embrace the use of visual effects and the wonderful things it frees you up to do."
"We are creating about 500 shots," explains visual effects supervisor Tom Wood. "The key visual effects shots are sequences dealing with the exterior of the space ship and the Sun, both being almost entirely computer-generated, which is quite unusual. Space ships are usually a combination of CGI and miniature, but we are going for a wholly CGI-designed exterior, apart from a little bit of an airlock sequence where we needed some physical action."
The biggest challenge for the visual effects team was to create the Sun, a planet that has never been photographed or filmed from anything other than from millions of miles away. "One of the hardest things is to convey is the scale of the Sun, how incredibly massive and incomprehensible large the Sun actually is," Wood explains. "It loses four million tons of matter every second. It has massive prominent projections of matter shooting constantly from its surface, which it ejects at a million miles an hour. Ludicrous values that we are constantly competing with. I think, at the very least, our Sun will be beautiful and awe-inspiring. And I hope it will be edge-of-the-seat terrifying as well."
"I try to make optimistic films," concludes Boyle, "and although some of them might be a bit tough, I hope that there's a life spirit in them that kind of transcends that, so you feel more alive when you come out than when you went in."
SUNSHINE began its 15-week shoot in August 2005 and post-production took place in London.
DNA Films is a joint venture with the US film distributor Fox Searchlight. The company finances and produces British films and provides access to an international distribution network.
Fox Searchlight Pictures is a filmmaker-oriented company that focuses on distinctive films helmed by world-class auteurs and exciting newcomers. It has its own marketing and distribution operations and its films are distributed internationally by Twentieth Century Fox. Fox Searchlight Pictures is a unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, a unit of Fox Entertainment Group.

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