Obi Wan says, "Gravity is pulling all the stars in the area to THIS point!" I never got the impression that gravity of planets affected stars...can someone more knowledgeable in science explain this to me? Is this another instance of the galaxy far far away being in another universe with it's own laws?
The gravity of every body in the universe technically exerts an influence on literally every other body in the universe. In most cases it is obviously so infinitesimal so as to be undetectable by Earth instruments, but we can assume that the civilization in Star Wars possesses sufficiently advanced technology to detect such effects when it comes to planets pulling on stars.
Yay, astronomy! Granted, a science in SW usually is "this sounds cool. Does it work irl- who gaf it sounds cool" Well, presumably, Kamino orbits a star Since Obi-Wan says gravity is pulling other stars TO a point, that could imply the star Kamino orbits is noticeably more massive than those in its neighbourhood. The only way you'll really see stars "pulled" in any particular way is to wait a really, really long time or to explicitly know that there's something to pull them "Pull" is really sort of a layman's term when it comes to gravity. Everything pulls and pushes everything, but for a whole star system to be missing from the archives, there'd obviously be something wonky about the way things are moving. For a smaller scale and real life example, think of the Solar System pre-1846. Uranus is moving weirdly and not at all like we would expect. Why? That's when we started to look for Neptune So in this case, the stars around that area are moving weirdly in a way that makes no sense. Explanation? Kamino's system is there, and they just don't know about it because it was deleted from the archives
As The Phantom Calamari said, every body in the universe affects every other body. Also, it's not just the planet of Kamino, but the system. The star, and all the planets. "Hmmm. Gravity's silhouette remains, but the star and all the planets disappeared, they have. How can this be?" If you take all the bodies into account, you can actually make a model of where they should be. In the script, they do a gravitational scan that results in some inconsistencies. The bodies aren't where they are supposed to be, based on the bodies in the archives. There's a gravity "silhouette" at work, but no bodies to explain it. The kid comes up with the idea that someone erased the system from the archive's memory (duh), and Yoda concludes that if you go to the center of the gravity "silhouette", the planet will be there. It's sorta similar to this scene from Star Trek Generations. In Generations, the destruction of a star alters the gravitational forces in a sector, forcing a ship to make a minor course correction to account for the realignment. It even alters the course of an "energy ribbon" traveling the galaxy. "The destruction of the Amargosa star has altered the gravitational forces throughout this sector. As a result, any ship passing through this region would have to make a minor course correction." In AOTC, the alignment of stars suggests a planetary system (star and planets) in a certain spot, but the system (Kamino) isn't there because Dooku erased it from the archive's memory. In the script, Jocasta even thinks the planet might have been recently destroyed.
I actually forgot that the entire system was deleted, which would of course make the gravitational silhouette even more obvious.
Yes, while they have deleted the scene with the scanning, in the last version of the movie we see that Obi Wan obviously wasn‘t satisfied with Yocasta‘s explanation and search for another answers (the gravity problem). Also after his hyperspace jump the movie cuts to him already found the system and identifying the planet in it.
