In " Star war : The Force Awakens , " an malevolent military junta call the First Order has risen from the laying waste of the Galactic Empire , and is wag war against with a particularly frightening new weapon . Starkiller Base , as it ’s call up , is an icy planet that ’s essentially been converted into a jumbo ray gas pedal , capable of obliterating an entire distant solar organization with a single shot .
The bad guys upped their biz considerably since the first " Star Wars " motion picture , in which the Empire ’s ultimate arm was theDeath Star , a moon - sized space station with the power to destroy a planet .
As theofficial Star Wars websiteexplains , Starkiller somehow harvests energy from the star it orbits , and then contains it within magnetic field of operation inside the fundament ’s planetary core . That vim is then rein and win over into an " extremist - sinewy beam " that can blast throughhyperspace — apparently a so - calledwormholein the time - infinite continuum in which unbelievable distance can be track at pep pill faster than light .
When the ray come out at the other end of hyperspace , those in its track are doomed . The Starkiller ’s ray of light is " able to sterilise the worlds of a distant star system of rules with a single shooter , " we ’re told .
The Nitty-Gritty Starkiller Mechanics
As often bump in scientific discipline fabrication , the details of how Starkiller would really work are left to the hearing ’s imagery . And if you ’ve suspended unbelief and immersed yourself in the " Star Wars " fancied universe , the idea of a weapon so immensely powerful credibly does n’t seem any severe to buy than lightsabers , talking robots with human - like personality , and The Force itself . In the real universe that we live in , though , is a solar system - killing weapon even remotely imaginable ? And if so , how would someone build it ?
University of Glasgowprofessor Martin A. Hendry , head of the university’sSchool of Physics and Astronomyand an periodic lecturer on the physic of " Star Wars , " says that that though the Starkiller is fantasy , it has at least a fiddling reality flux in .
" The Sun ’s magnetized field is very important in funnel hot blood plasma , an ionized gas , close to its control surface , " suppose Hendry in an electronic mail . " We see these vast typewriter ribbon of spicy gas as prominence , and they can be the cause of violent eruptions know as solar flare that transmit orotund amount of hot gas across the solar system — make display of northern lights when the plasm hits our atmosphere . "
Areally powerful flare , he says , could make an electromagnetic pulse with passing destructive effects . " It fundamentally would mail our applied science back to the Stone Age , " says Hendry , but it would n’t be enough to wipe out the planet , the way that Starkiller supposedly can .
Hendry say the melodic theme of using magnetic fields to stop and direct beams of plasma — which is pretty near to what Starkiller purportedly does — is based on perfectly sound physics .
" Where it jumps the shark is the way that the plasm is being train from the star to the planet with the Starkiller base through apparently empty place , " he says . " How does the Starkiller floor get a sufficiently intense magnetic field to re - direct so much of the star ’s plasma towards it ? I call back the effects during that sequence looked smashing , but the physical science was n’t very sound I ’m afraid . "
While the melodic theme of steal energy from a virtuoso to power a artillery seems like the means to go , " it ’s just not clear how you do it , " says Hendry .
Actual Star Death
When star are wiped out in the real world , they often do it to themselves , by blowing up into supernovas when they run out of fuel . Another way that a star can be destroy is if it collides with ablack jam , whose intense gravitational attraction creates force that literally can deplume a star aside if it amount too close , according to anarticleon NASA ’s website .
When that go on , the outcome is call off a tidal disruption , and most of the lead rubble is sucked toward the black golf hole by its gravitational force . As that happens , the dust is heat to millions of grade in temperature , and beget an tremendous amount of cristal - beam radiation until the debris falls beyond the black hole ’s effect horizon , a point from which no lighting can escape .
Astronomers actually have used NASA ’s Chandra X - Ray Observatory , the European Space Agency ’s XMM - Newton and the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer in concert to take note a inglorious mess ’s destruction of a star , in anevent called ASASSN-14li , which was first discovered in November 2014 . The material - life-time virtuoso killer whale is a smuggled hole located in the center field of PGC 043234 , a beetleweed about 290 million lightsome years from Earth , which is estimate to weigh several million times the mass of our Sun . Here ’s avideo animationillustrating what it looked like .
Pretty coolheaded , huh ?
But in orderliness to use a black hollow as a star - killing weapon , you ’d need to be able to build and see to it one . Back in 1989 , a British scientist , Martyn J. Fogg , published apaperin which he suggested somehow placing a manmade black-market hole on Jupiter , and then using it to generate enough vim to warm up the temperatures on the giant planet ’s moonlight Europa to Earthlike levels .
Can We Actually Kill a Star?
That ’s something that , if potential , is room , fashion beyond anything that locomotive engineer can do today . In 2010 , though , Chinese researchers did get some attention by build a twist call anomnidirectional electromagnetic absorberthat they likened to a " mini black hole , " in that it could absorb microwave radiation in the manner that an astrophysical black fix could bury up a star and its energy .
As you might ideate , they ’d have to scale up that gentleman’s gentleman - made adaptation of a fatal hole quite a minute to have a arm as powerful as Starkiller . Until they do , we ’ll just have to rely upon George Lucas ' special burden for stellar annihilation .
