Scientific Anomalies in the Star Wars Universe

I'm doing a project on the astronomical inconcsistencies throughout all 5 films. I already have a huge list, but, if anyone wants to add something they've always noticed, etc. feel free. I just don't want to forget anything incredibly important.

 

I've always wondered how Tantooine manages to orbit 2 stars. Wouldn't 2 stars close by just smash into each other?

How did the Millenium Falcon quickly travel between 2 solar systems without using a hyperdrive?

How could Naboo not have a solid core?

Those are the big ones I can think of right now.

 

How did the Millenium Falcon quickly travel between 2 solar systems without using a hyperdrive?

Nothing in the films or EU says it was quickly.

How could Naboo not have a solid core?

The earth technically does not have a solid core either.

 

In our own universe there are binary stars with planets orbiting them. From what I have read Alpha Centauri which is our closest system, has three stars. Two about the size of the sun and on little dwarf star. From what they belive the two moderate sized suns each have a system of planets orbiting them. But it is one system due to their closeness.

SELDON

 

Naboo's core: Not being solid isn't the question, or rather, it shouldn't be. But a core of water? Doubtful.

As for the trip between Hoth/Anoat and Bespin, I think it's more interesting that they were near the Anoat system when they were attached to the star Destroyer. The trip to Bespin took some time, most estimates I've seen are 2 months, that also being the time of Luke's training on Dagobah. Still, 2 months at sub-light wouldn't get you from system to system. And the trip from Hoth to Anoat couldn't have taken two months. Seriously, could they keep up the chase (or rather, could Han keep up the dodging) for more than a day or two solid at absolute best? I doubt it, and personally, I don't think it was nearly that long.

 

I've always wondered how Tantooine manages to orbit 2 stars. Wouldn't 2 stars close by just smash into each other?

As Seldon said, binary star systems are a natural occurrance. There are numerous instances of this phenomenon. Although from memory, any planets that exist in this binary system are expect to have some funky orbits.

As for anomalies...well, you could talk about the fact that you cant actually hear any noise in space...so all those explosions you see, shouldnt really have the accompanying sound effects.

 

Wouldn't the Death Star's orbit around a planet cause certain...inconsistencies...like with the tides and such?

 

As I've been made two understand it, systems with two stars are actually more frequently occuring than systems like our own.

And it is a commonly accepted fact that Jupiter was actually going to be our second star at one point.

 

Wouldn't the Death Star's orbit around a planet cause certain...inconsistencies...like with the tides and such?

Yes, it would. It would be like having an extra moon (or having a moon at all). No matter its position, it will affect the tides. The effect can be minimized, however, depending on its orbit.

EDIT: yes, Jupiter nearly became a second star for our own system. However, it never achieved enough mass to begin the fusion process that would have made it a full fledged star, so it remains merely a giant planet.

 

Well, I guess if you're going to destroy a planet, tidal anomalies would be pretty trivial.

 

Well, theres that too

But I highly doubt the Death Star would be orbiting a planet for any prolonged period of time.

It seems to me to be a travelling space station, going to wherever the Empire needs it to be, doing its job, then going somewhere else.

 

As others have pointed out, binary star systems are extremely common. There might be problems with having planets capable of sustaining human life in such systems, however.

The Hoth-Anoat-Bespin trip would have taken years at sublight. To put it in context, the closest star system to earth is about 4.3 light years away. Even if the distances between Hoth and Anoat and Anoat and Bespin were each half this, the journey would have taken over four years. I think the best solution is to assume that they were using a low speed hyperdrive backup.

The Naboo core thing is indeed not viable, as far as I know.

The homogeneity of planets in the Star Wars galaxy is unscientific. We have a desert planet, a swamp planet, an ice planet, etc. - but on Earth, we have all these environments and more. Now there are a lot of planets and moons that are quite desolate and might be called desert planets; but the problem is that these are extreme conditions. It's highly unlikely that there could be an all-desert planet (or all-swamp planet, etc.) suitable for human life.

Geonosis appears to have rings, but it is a rocky planet. As far as we know, rings only form around gas giants.

The asteroid belts (both in ESB and in AotC) are depicted as quite a bit more turbulent and violent than asteroid belts really are.

As was pointed out, there's the whole sound in space thing (I'm afraid Ben Burtt's "sound black hole" wouldn't get very far in the academic literature).

Han, Leia, and Chewie step out of the Falcon in the asteroid with no more than breath masks - they should have exploded due to the low pressure.

For that matter, the space slug is about the least plausible alien I've ever seen. I'm tempted to say that no creatures could evolve in space, but that sounds like the sort of thing that gets pulled out and laughed at when such a creature is eventually discovered. But really, why would it look like a worm? Why have a mouth? What did it eat?

 

Alpha Centauri (that binary system I mentioned before) is actually capable of having a planet that could sustain life according to NASA.

Also I never actually took the travel trough the core to be literal. I don't think they went throught the real core. I think they went deep within the crust and it brought them to another part of the planet. But Boss Nass is not exactly well educated and he is probably a little ignorant of scientific truths. He just assumes it is the core.

 

I agree with Seldon as far as traveling through the core. Part of it is we don't know how far apart the Gungan city and Theed are.

The Space Slugs (like Mynocks) are supposed to eat metal (Mynocks chew on the power cables as well, though ) as I recall. Not that I'm saying such would be a viable scientific possibility

 

Geonosis appears to have rings, but it is a rocky planet. As far as we know, rings only form around gas giants.

Also, Geonosis' rings seem to be made of gigantic asteroids...all the ringed planets I know of have rings of icy particles...which are at most a kilometer across.

 

The Death Star is pretty small, and it's hollow (more or less).

Therefore there would not be enough mass in it to have a significant effect on a planetary tidal system.

 

"The homogeneity of planets in the Star Wars galaxy is unscientific. We have a desert planet, a swamp planet, an ice planet, etc. - but on Earth, we have all these environments and more. Now there are a lot of planets and moons that are quite desolate and might be called desert planets; but the problem is that these are extreme conditions. It's highly unlikely that there could be an all-desert planet (or all-swamp planet, etc.) suitable for human life."

Very good point. I was considering this, but, then again, we never saw ALL of any of the planets, so I wasn't about to use it as a point, but, it makes sense.

http://www.nav-computer.com/

That site is very interesting.

 

I've always wondered why the space slug can survive on the asteroid... without breathing, nearly freezing...

 

How about sounds in space?

Traveling FASTER THAN LIGHT through a supposed dimension called hyperspace?

 

Fast-than-light travel is an area of study in physics (I think even Hawking is working on that sort of thing). From what I gather, its theoretically possible, we just dont currently have the know-how to do it.

Actually, I think I might know of a good person to try to get in here....pretty well read with respect to space stuff. Maybe 2 even...

 

Therefore there would not be enough mass in it to have a significant effect on a planetary tidal system.

I question that. It doesn't have as much mass as a moon, true, but it also orbits much closer. Take the Second Death Star orbiting Endor as the example. Gravitational forces are proportional to mass, yes, but also inversely proportional to the distance SQUARED. I think it makes up the lack of mass with distance, so it would still affect tides.

 

Darth-Dagsy:

Faster than light travel is theoretically impossible for any particle whose mass at rest is real. There are two theoretical reasons for that:

i) In order to any particle to get from sub-light speed to super-light speed, there should be an instant where its speed must be exactly lightspeed. By Einstein's Special Relativity, any particle with mass different from zero needs infinite energy to travel exactly at lightspeed, which leads to an obvious paradox.

ii) Any particle with real mass at rest would need an imaginary amount of energy to travel at speed higher than lightspeed, and imaginary magnitudes are a big no-no in physics.

OTOH, any particle whose mass is imaginary at rest should have imaginary mass if travelling at any speed below lightspeed, so these kind of particles, called tachyons, not only can, but must travel above lightspeed in order to exist.

And with this, my friends, we end our today's class on Special Relativity. Tomorrow's class will deal with the Twins Paradox...

Actually, the Star Wars version of space travel is quite accurate IMHO. To travel at speeds higher than lightspeed, we would need 'jump' to other 'dimension' which could be called hyperspace. But this is Quantum Field Theory, and trust me, you don't want to go there.

 

Endor is a problem since it's a Forest moon. A planet or moon that consists entirely of forest is geologically nonsensical (especially considering the amount of oxygen in the air).

In general you could argue that it is very very unlikely that every planet or moon in the Star Wars saga has a gravity of exactly 1g and exactly the correct amount of oxygen in the air. But on the other hand it's not strictly speaking "impossible".

A thing that always bothered me were the Tauntauns. It's nonsensical for creatures like this to evolve on a purely Arctic planet. They die quicker in the cold than humans do!!! And you cannot assume that they live in caves etc. because in biology the issue is not whether creatures might survive extreme conditions with the help of shelter (such as humans who can adapt to a certain extent to arctic conditions by building shelter, dressing warm etc.) . Rather nature would have never allowed creatures to evolve on a planet such as Hoth in the first place without equipping them with natural defence mechanisms. When the arctic cycle expanded on Earth every species of animals that lived there died out if they weren't equipped for it like the penguins.

 

Regarding faster than light travel: as Little_Younglin pointed out, special relativity forbids any particle from passing the speed of light, since that would require an infinite amount of energy. There are a couple of tricks and loopholes people have suggested for faster than light travel, though:

1. Special relativity is not strictly true. In quantum mechanics, it has been experimentally confirmed that particles can and do send information to each other faster than light (instantaneously). Unfortunately, it has also been experimentally confirmed that the way in which they do this prevents us from ever using the effect to send information (much less people) instantaneously. But the really significant thing about this quantum non-locality is that it rules out special relativity as a strictly true theory. This conflict between special relativity and quantum mechanics is one of the big foundational problems in physics right now (though not as popularly known as the conflict between quantum mechanics and general relativity).

2. Quantum tunneling. This is an interesting one about which I have to admit I don't know all that much. The word is that a few researchers claim to have sent information faster than light by means of an effect called quantum tunneling. The idea is that due to the uncertainty principle, there's nothing preventing a particle that used to be in front of me from actually turning out to be on Mars, or across the galaxy. But I don't think that this is considered a really viable way of travelling faster than light.

3. Tachyons. The idea is that special relativity forbids crossing the speed of light. Theoretically, then, there could be particles that always travel faster than light. Special relativity would forbid them from ever dropping below the speed of light. They would also move backward in time relative to us. Unfortunately, no such particles have ever been found, despite quite a bit of searching.

4. Hyperspace. As far as I know, this first appeared as a technique for faster than light travel in Isaac Asimov (whence also come the city planet, blasters, and names like "Bail" and "Corellian"). The idea is that there is some parallel universe in which things are closer together, so by popping into that universe, travelling a little bit, and popping back out you can effectively travel faster than light. This actually makes a little sense in general relativity, for it turns out there that space itself can be curved. So the shortest path between two points may not be a direct line in our space - it may be (in a literal, geometric sense) shorter to pass through "hyperspace". But of course as far as we know cosmologically there is no hyperspace.

5. Wormholes. This is an interesting one somewhat related to the above. Again, the idea is that the shortest distance through our curved space may not be the shortest distance possible. But here the idea is that two points might be connected by a sort of passage that cuts across the curve in space. Incidentally, this also looks like the best candidate for time travel. On the down side, no one has been able to figure out how such a wormhole might exist and be traversable by us.

 

Oh boy, let's see:

Our nearest neighbor is composed of Alpha Centauri A and B, the third is called Proxima Centauri. As I recall, systems with multiple stars make up have the systems in our galaxy. A world can orbit two stars, the stars will have a Bary Center and in essence orbit each other while the planet orbits the center of gravity made up by both stars(Bary Center again).

Depending on the arrangements, planets could have very odd orbits which would give complex life a hard time getting a foothold.

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Let's go with the large version of the Death Star, the one as quoted in Cinefex magazine as being 500 miles in diameter. This is a bit smaller than our largest asteroid Ceres, so Endor would have something like a large asteroid orbiting it. Given the energy capabilities of the DS its mass could be enormous, it takes a power outout equal to to all the stars in the galaxy for one second to make Alderran blow up as it did.
It's like having a supernova at your fingertips.
There is a model in string theory that says a one meter long superstring could have a mass equal to the Earth! But, because of it's topology its gravitational effects would be closed on itself. This means that even superstrings with a mass equal to the Sun would have no outward effect. If the DS has eccess to this kind of power, then only its mass as equal to a large asteroid is to be worried about.

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Jupiter never came close to being a star. It would need a minimum of 80 times more its current mass to ignite fusion at its core.

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Quantum tunneling is just a borrowing of energy to move information concerning the location of the particle along a wavefront. Nothing is moving FTL in said experiments.

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Wormholes: the space between the connected wormhole mouths is often called 'hyperspace'. Interesting that in ANH the Falcon looks like it is going through a tunnel.
Wormholes may lay below the Planck Length, the next generation of particle accelerators MIGHT be able to detect the influance of these wormholes IF they exist as various math models show. You will need access to the entire output of a star to open one to a usable size and keep it open.

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Waterworlds are not only possible but very likely to be numerous. Europa is a icy crusted world with a potentially large ocean underneath. Had Europa migrated inward, the icy crust would be melted and if close enough to the Sun could have a greenhouse effect that would provide an atmosphere. The crust would be melted away and you would have an active water world. Ganymede may be the same way.
I am not sure about desert worlds, in our solar system if Earth were a little closer but not as close to the Sun as Venus, it could have become dry at the very least. I am not sure about that though.
If water worlds are possible, then Hoth type worlds are too. The only anomoly concerning SW is having a breathable atmosphere on the various planets shown.

Thanks Dags for pointing this thread out to me.