Ed Helms

This sounds not good.

These are big words, and I don't know if this is—

And it's like we'll get into the specifics, but it did already sound scary.

Like you said, it's like we didn't have a great understanding of how interconnected maybe our world is.

And we're about to enter things like the hole in the ozone by the 80s and whatnot.

And it is interesting.

The atmosphere is the only thing maintaining the life on our planet.

Let's poke a hole in it.

Let's see what happens, you know.

The New York Times story the next day described it as a luminous red rim around a fireball created solid walls of heavy color ranging from yellow oranges to deep reds that shimmered for a full 15 minutes split by white lines that arched north and south parallel to one another through the reddish glow.

So what's happening here is we essentially created an aurora borealis.

This is kind of a fun, nerdy film thing.

I'm sure you know one of the complaints about the Star Wars movies, especially the early movies, is the explosions in outer space are not realistic because there's no oxygen in outer space.

So you can't have fire in outer space.

And so how did these big, fiery explosions happen?

Well, I was sort of wondering the same thing here.

So you might be wondering why an explosion that high would still be so bright and visible when there is no oxygen.

The explosion caused a massive burst of charged particles that collided with atmospheric molecules, resulting in an aurora borealis.

On top of that, despite the lower oxygen levels, the explosion produced such intense radiation

that it excited the surrounding atmosphere, leading to the bright light observed.