Sometimes being a physicist is awesome. Case in point: Three researchers in the physics and astronomy department at the University of Leicester decided to put their combined skills to use and determine whether Darth Vader’s Death Star could actually generate enough energy to destroy a planet.In George Lucas’ 1977 classic “Star Wars: A New Hope,” the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station, more commonly referred to as the Death Star, is a moon-sized battle station commissioned by the Emperor to strike fear in the hearts of the Rebel Alliance. Its principle weapon was its Concave Dish Composite Beam Super Laser – or just laser beam – that could destroy planets with one shot. We all saw what happened to Alderaan.The Leicester physicists, David Boulderstone, Calum Meredith, and Simon Clapton, have delved into the science behind this science fiction. They figured there was enough information about the Death Star in the films to determine what its power output would be. From there, they could figure out just how plausible is it’s planet-killing capacity.Before addressing the Death Star, they looked at its target planets. They assumed the average target would be something Earthlike, roughly the same size and composition. Like Alnderaan, they assumed the target planet will be unarmed and certainly without a protective shield generator. They also assumed a solid planet.Their next step was to determine the energy that a solid Earthlike planet would need to stay in one piece. The gravity that binds a planet together is measurable, so the energy needed to tear that planet apart has to be greater. Breaking its binding gravity field will send chunks of ex-planet into space.I’ll skip the math. They figured that the Death Star’s laser beam would need about 2.25×10^32 Joules to destroy an Earthlike planet like Alderaan. A larger planet like Jupiter would need significantly more energy to tear it apart, somewhere on the order of about 2×10^36 Joules. As a reference, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima code named “Little Boy” generated between 54 and 75 Terajoules; on the high end, that’s just 7.5×10^12 Joules.In plain English, you’d need a bomb 20 orders of magnitude more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, with its energy concentrated into a point by a laser, to destroy the Earth.Lucky for the Empire, the Death Star had the kind of power. At the heart of the battle station is a hypermatter reactor that has the equivalent energy output of many main sequence stars combined. Consider that our Sun, a main sequence star, puts out about 3X10^26 Joules. Many suns will put out much more power. It wouldn’t even be a strain on its core for the Death Star to destroy a Jupiter-sized planet.So there you go. Building a Death Star isn’t impossible, assuming you could first develop a hypermatter reactor (or something equivalent), and lock down the funding for building a steel moon. But that’s really a small price to pay for planet-demolishing abilities. Who wants to apply for the loan?A version of this piece originally ran on Motherboard.
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