Sunshine

As pointed out by one of the characters, the ship enters the "blackout" area around the sun (and loses contact with Earth) anomalously early, before Mercury's orbit in fact.

Communications from this close to the sun are not a problem in reality (and were possible with 1970s technology), but the writer and director took deliberate creative license to improve the tension.

In his DVD commentary, director Danny Boyle says the original idea for Icarus I was to "be on its side, like the Zeebrugge".

In fact, he is referring to the "Herald of Free Enterprise", the British ferry that capsized on 6 March 1987 while leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

193 passengers and crew were killed.

Two of the crew members jump from the Icarus I to the Icarus II without space suits.

Contrary to expectations created by B-movie science fiction, this is entirely possible.

The human body simply does not have enough internal pressure to explode in vacuum.

Air in the lungs is expelled almost instantaneously, provided that the subject doesn't attempt try to hold his/her breath.

Blood is contained and held under pressure by tension from the walls of the circulatory system, so it has has no way to boil.

A prepared individual can remain conscious for more than ten seconds, and stay alive for for several minutes, in a complete total vacuum.

One NASA engineer involved in a vacuum chamber mishap has discussed the sensation of standing exposed in vacuum until he lost consciousness, from which he recovered completely.

During the "space jump", one of the crew members freezes solid in a couple of minutes.

Space is very cold, but objects in a vacuum cool down extremely slowly.

The heat in the object has to go somewhere.

On Earth, the heat would be transferred to the cold surroundings, such as the air, by contact.

In a vacuum, there is nothing to transfer the heat to, so objects that are warm stay warm for a long time.

This is the principle behind vacuum flasks.

The only way a object in a perfect vacuum can cool down is by electromagnetic black-body radiation.

A person would radiate about 1000 Watts (57 BTUs per minute) in this situation, which is only about 7 times more than they would radiate in a 68 F room.

During the spacewalk scene where Capa, Mace and Harvey are trying to get back aboard the Icarus I from Icarus II, they float across into the airlock.

The shot cuts to the airlock control panel, which indicates "Equalise", whereupon Capa and Mace immediately crash to the floor of the airlock as it's re-pressurized.

This wouldn't happen; gravity operates whether there's an atmosphere or a vacuum, and once they were inside the gravitational field of Icarus I (however it works), they'd have literally "fallen" to the floor immediately.

The energy from fusion at the core of the Sun takes about a million years to propagate to the surface, meaning that although we could detect cessation of fusion in the core (via neutrinos), we could not observe any change in the Sun's light for about a million years.

At the beginning of the movie the ship is 36 million miles from the Sun, and thus the Sun would appear about (93/36)^2 = 6.

7 times brighter than it would on Earth.

But the computer says that at 4% transmission through the screen, the Sun would cause eye damage - despite being four times fainter than it would appear on Earth (and we know that in the story the Sun at Earth is fainter than we observe it today).

Still, at 36 million miles, the Sun would only be about 1.

3 degrees in angular size - much smaller than one's fist at arm's length.

Searle's statement about 80% of dust being human skin is a commonly held, but false, urban myth.

Common household dust on Earth is composed of many different things, and none of them individually account for anything close to 80% of it.

Given the situation, it's entirely possible that the dust he's looking at is mostly human skin, but this is not true for dust in general.

Critical damage is caused to Icarus II by sunlight reflecting off a communications tower onto the structure.

Yet, when Icarus II approaches Icarus I - much closer to the sun - its shield reflects sunlight onto the rear of Icarus I with no ill-effects to that ship at all.

- PLOTAs the crew attempts to rotate the shield to repair it, there is an argument that they would lose com towers 3 and 4, which they say would need on the way home.

However, many shots including the simulation of payload delivery reveal that the Icarus' small shield which is supposed to protect Icarus after the payload is detached, just isn't wide enough to protect those towers at all, so they would've lost them anyway.

It is even questionable, whether this shield would be capable of protecting the Icarus itself after detaching the payload with the large shield and at that close distance from the sun.

Icarus II has an on-board computer that is capable of detecting how much oxygen the crew is using and for how long a crew member is able to observe the sun at 3.

1% before causing irreversible damage to the eyes.

It also has some internal program logic to identify whether it's captain's command jeopardizes the mission or not.

Yet it fails to inform the crew that there is an unknown - thus potentially dangerous person on the board.

[It could be that, as the planned mission had no way for extra crew to get on board, that the possibility wasn't included by the computer programmers.

Computers only do what they're told.

Who'd expect they'd pick up a psycho deep in space? While the computer understands speech and the needs of the ship well, that doesn't mean it's intelligent.

] In the final scene, the western side of the Sydney Opera House is seen in the background, viewed from a parkland.

There is no parkland west of the Opera House.

That area is the old suburb of Sydney called The Rocks.

While set 50 years in the future, The Rocks would not be converted to parkland as it is full of national heritage buildings.

This error is due to the fact that the scene was filmed in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Opera House added later.

Cassie turns the Icarus II to 'generate shadow' for the repair to take place, but the computer animation on the screen indicates the intended maneuver won't take any part of the shield out of sunlight.

Icarus tells Searle it is safe to watch the sun at a filter of 3.

1 % for 30 seconds, thus Searle commands to proceed, but then Icarus dims the screen already after 20 seconds.