Man or Superman?
As Superman returns to cinemas, Flipside searches for the real-life man of steel. Here we look at the ‘Superman curse’ and whether a planet really can explode...
Is there a Superman curse?
 Any budding Hollywood star might be wise to avoid the role of Superman. At best, stuck in TV movie hell, at worst, well… Just look what happened to these actors who donned the blue tights:
Kirk Alyn failed to sustain a film career, despite being in the successful 1948 serial Superman.
George Reeves, who played the Man of Steel in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman, was shot in mysterious circumstances.
Christopher Reeve, star of the Superman movies, became a quadriplegic after a riding accident.
Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman star Dean Cain’s CV is distinctly TV.
Tom Welling may be doing well in Smallville, but his first major leading film role was in The Fog - a flop.
Watch out, Brandon Routh!
Exploding Planets
Superman came to Earth because his home planet Krypton was blown to smithereens. But just how does a planet explode?
 Superman’s super strength on Earth suggests that Krypton would have been far more massive than Earth, with gravity hundreds of times stronger, thereby defying any known laws of physics. Its demise has been described as due to the huge weight of surrounding rock bearing down on its uranium core, exerting incredible pressure, eventually leading to it blowing up. This transformed the remnants of the rocky planet into the highly radioactive element kryptonite.
According to Dr David Rothery, Chairman of the Open University's planetary science courses, “There is no known reason why a planet should explode. Stars can exceed a 'critical mass' when they run out of nuclear fuel. The core collapses and the outer layers get flung off - a supernova explosion.”
But the only way to break a planet apart, says Rothery, is if it were struck by a large (say more than 1/100th its own size), fast-moving (typically tens of km per second) object, such as another planet. “This kind of thing may have gone on in our own Solar System while the planets were still forming (4,500 million years ago) and would tend to make planets grow more often than it broke them apart, but it can't happen any more because the remaining bodies are in non-intersecting orbits. A rogue object not belonging to our Solar System might appear out of nowhere, but the chances of that are remote.”
So Krypton exploding is just fantasy. “I wouldn't even dignify it with the description 'science fiction' because there seems to be no scientifically plausible mechanism for that to happen,” he says.
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