A question on /r/askscience talks about how big a nuke would have to be to . A question here on StackExchange talks about whether or not the Death Star could  due to the planetary shields around it (from the EU/Legends).  Just how strong was the Death Star's superlaser, in terms of of tonnes of watts?   I'm guessing there is no exact number, but if we know that the Death Star destroyed Alderaan (that should be fairly easy to calculate using the formula for gravitational binding energy of a spherical mass) and if we assume it could have destroyed Coruscant, how strong would its laser need to be?  EDIT: I suppose I wasn't clear in my question, I wasn't asking for Wookieepedia entries on how powerful the superlaser was, I was asking based on the fact that it could destroy a planet and overwhelm planetary shields, how strong would the laser have to be.
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As we discussed it in , the Death Star  can deliver a mind-boggling amount of energy. If it is capable of blowing up an Earth-sized planet, this means the equivalent of the annihilation energy of over 1,200,000,000,000 tonnes of . In comparison, nukes measure on this scale in the gram range (the one used at Hiroshima being under one gram). This means, even if the shot gets a million times weaker due to distance, it is probably still enough to kill all multi-cellular life on a planet.  Regarding this, how much is the maximum effective range of the Death Star? By effective I mean that even if it does not blow up a planet Alderaan-style, it delivers enough damage on a planetary scale to effectively cripple a planet.  Is there any related information in the expanded universe?
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The Jedi can control objects with the mystical power called the Force without touching them.  In the movies you can see, that the Jedi or Sith are moving objects really fast and really well controlled from one place to another.  Now I'm wondering, why did Jedi or a Sith never use the Force to fight with a lightsaber, or with more lightsabers, or even to control other weapons like a laser gun without touching them? I imagine a Jedi or a Sith with 4 lightsabers around, all of them are floating in the air, controlled by him and the Force. Would this even be possible? What is the force really able to do?       Or, as mentioned in *Kid Dynamo", why don't they just yank the   supports out in a building and let that crush the people inside (or at   least force them to devote a lot of effort to keep from dying)?   Admittedly, Dooku did use something like that when he forced Yoda to   divert his attention to the pillar.
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Is there any lower or upper limit on the energy of a photon? i.e. does the mathematical framework we currently use to study photons blow up when a photon surpasses a certain upper limit of energy? (or the same on the opposite side?)  My thoughts: If I let the energy of a photon tend to infinity, its wavelength would be tending to zero, and since it is thought that we cannot really distinguish things when they are on the scale of a Planck Length, would the photon have its maximum energy when its wavelength is equal to the Planck length? (Feel free to correct me, I feel I might not be.) and for the opposite end of the spectrum a photon with the least energy would have zero wavelength, implying no photon, which is a trivial case.
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We all know how to blow up the first Death Star: Fire a couple of proton torpedoes into the thermal exhaust port.  It's ray shielded, so only torpedoes will do.  To do this, the Rebel pilots had to fly down a very long trench, where they were vulnerable to fire from any TIE fighters to the rear.  In fact they were so vulnerable that most of the pilots on this run were blown up once the Imperial forces started responding to the attack. This battle is in space, so the fighters can, if necessary, come to a dead stop and hold their position while firing.  Also, when Luke fired his torpedoes, they took a 90 degree turn and went straight into the port.  So the torpedoes didn't have to be fired from in the trench. We also didn't see any gun emplacements firing at the fighters from near the exhaust port, but if there were, the Rebels could have targeted them and taken them out or run interference to make it hard for the towers to fire at a fighter targeting the exhaust port.  (They were already dodging fire in the trench as well.) A fighter could have easily flown directly at the exhaust port, firing torpedoes multiple times on approach and, if not under fire (or if protected by other fighters), could have actually stopped and taken time to target the exhaust port before firing. Is there any valid in-universe reason that the pilots had to fly down the trench before firing on the port?  And if there is, is there any reason they had to enter the trench so early? Just for reference, here is the  on YouTube.  There's no explanation given for having to fly in the trench.
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We know that the second Death Star was meant to have a different/non-existent exhaust port and when under construction it had a shield projected around it.  Other than these elements, one of which was planned to be totally temporary, do we know of any other improvements over its predecessor?  Did it have improved defences against one-man fighters? Did its laser charge more quickly? Did it have an upmarket cafeteria?
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In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, once the Starkiller Base has depleted the star it is drawing power from, is it supposed to travel to another star where it can draw more power? Or is it non-mobile and supposed to fire a few, limited shots only? Or can it somehow reuse the star it is drawing power from, even after it has been depleted?  Its name suggests that it will "kill" or completely deplete the star it is drawing power from, but I haven't noticed an indication in the film that the Starkiller Base can travel to other stars.
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On Takodana,      the main characters and various bar patrons can see the planet Hosnian Prime being destroyed by Starkiller Base with their (respective) naked eyes. How did they see this? Is the Hosnian system close enough to see? If it's not very close and they could just see the explosion, how did the light from it reach them so quickly?
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I was recently watching Episode 3 and a few clone wars episodes, and I found myself thinking during the opening battle between the Republic and General Grievous' forces above Coruscant, on a planet so densely populated where potentially thousands of inhabitants can be killed from a drifting capital class ship with a decaying orbit during space battles what defenses are in place?  Is there any instances of some form of emergency services that tractor beam chunks of debris to safe landing places or repulsor towers that can slow or suspend it until it can be taken apart safely? Even disintegration lasers or emergency force field generators like the types deployed on Hoth as they must have the energy output capable of sustaining it. This IS the galactic capital so must have some advanced tech at its deposal. Even now in our own development humans have certain preventative measures for all types of threats and ways of tracking them, plus responses or fall back plans.
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In the movie The Rise of Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine dispatches the Xyston-class Star Destroyer Derriphan to the planet Kijimi to destroy it, and it does so using its axial superlaser.  I am curious to know if the Derriphan had immediately returned to the planet Exegol, participated in the Battle of Exegol, and was destroyed with the other Star Destroyers. If it did not return to Exegol, is it safe to assume that after the Battle of Exegol, it cruised around the galaxy and likely blew up other Resistance planets?  I've been researching Star Wars canon and websites, but I haven't found anything yet that sheds light on what happened to this Star Destroyer.
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David Z's answer to  got me wondering - is any appreciable amount of lithium produced as the result of a supernova explosion, either by fusion (which seems unlikely to me, but I don't have great intuition for this), or by the decay of unstable species produced by the supernova? If so, what decay chains end with lithium?
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Why does Rey wear dark goggles inside a dark, poorly lit star destroyer? After all, she's using a flashlight to help her see, so wouldn't just taking off the goggles make things easier for her?    Other than giving the movie suspense for about 45 seconds by not revealing Rey's identity, is there an in-universe answer for this?
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Someone asked me this question and I don't think I gave him an adequate answer (I was trying to think of the extreme case - that of neutron stars)
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The temperature that  can produce is limited due to the solid angle of the sun itself.  Entropic arguments dictate that you can't focus the sun's light to create temperatures higher than the sun's surface, and sure enough, the size of the dot where its focused can't be minimized beyond a certain limit.  Lasers offer a very potent beam of light, but it would seem to me that it is also highly organized beam of light, since all of the photons in the beam are traveling in very nearly the same direction.  Question: Let's say that I have a laser beam of some given power that starts with some diameter $D_o$ at the point of emission and increases to $D_f$ at some distance $r$ away.  Would this be sufficient information to imply a limit to the power per unit area (W/m^2) that could be obtained through focusing and what would that be?  What lens characteristics and approaches would someone look for in order to do this with a laser pointer?  I should note that the  but I'll be forthcoming that I don't understand it and find it confusing.  Well, it mentions wavelength, which I recognize would limit the W/m^2 power if the beam was perfectly straight, but I'm interested in the limit due to manufactured imperfection of the laser, so unless somebody is over-complicating this (which is fine as long as you answer the question first), I don't think the answer should have anything to do with the wavelength.  I mean, the wavelength should be sufficiently small compared to the size of the dot that could be created, correct me if this is the wrong way of thinking of it.  I'm also interested if this is the mechanism used for .  Note that the Wikipedia article introduces the subject with Laser cutting is a technology that uses a laser to cut materials.  Pardon the internet speak, but this makes me want to facepalm.    I'm seeing several new terms so I'm putting a glossary here to help the discussion.   Gaussian beam Divergence half-angle Far field   A Gaussian beam is a beam where if you shine it on paper, the intensity has a Gaussian distribution.  Easy enough.  The Divergence half-angle is the angle it's diverging at, given a few qualifiers, from     Far field is a point far to the right on this image where the width of the beam is close to the black lines.  Some other mechanism prevents it from converging at a point in the middle because, of course, we could have already dismissed that as theoretically impossible.
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I've been looking into the inner workings of blaster weapons primarily using Wookieepedia. While most of it I understand, I still can't figure out how many rounds a gun would fire before needing the ammunition component replaced/reloaded. Is there any solid answer?  I'm someone who likes to design and draw his own weapons and such, but likes to keep to how the technology of an era is in mind. While Star Wars weapons don't really have magazines (and you don't really see them reloading during battle), other people's work still has magazines and treat ammunition consumption as though it's pretty much the same as our modern era.  I guess that I just find it hard to believe, with the technology of the Star Wars Universe, that characters would need to carry lots of ammunition (hence why clones/storm troopers/battle droids don't visually seem to carry very much).  Example: DC-15A     "The weapon's tibanna gas cartridge carried enough gas for up to 500 shots, depending on the power settings of the weapon, while the charge pack lasted about 50 shots"   Source:   I've read in several places that this can be seen in two different ways.  1. Which ever ran out first, had to be replaced before the weapon could fire again. 2. The weapon contained two different sources of ammunition (so I guess you could switch between the two)
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Wikipedia has this page on  using planets. In some cases this effect was used to accelerate the spacecraft to a higher velocity. This diagram shows this in a very oversimplified manner.   That got me thinking that if light is affected by gravity, and if it slingshots around the black hole/massive object, can't it gain a higher speed than $c$? What limitations are stopping it from doing this?  Forgive me if the answer to this question is pretty straight-forward or staring-you-in-the-face kind. I haven't fully understood the mechanics of the gravitational slingshot fully yet, but I couldn't wait to ask this. Note: If it is possible (I highly doubt that!), could you provide an explanation using Newtonian mechanics, I'm not very familiar with general relativity because I'm in high school.
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Does the Schwarzschild radius exist at the exact tipping point where neutron degeneracy pressure fails?  For example, consider a hypothetical neutron star that is being held up just below the limit of neutron degeneracy pressure. If the neutron star gains enough mass (assume a constant radius), it will collapse into a black hole. Does neutron degeneracy pressure fail at the exact point where the neutron star gains enough mass appropriate for the resultant black hole's Schwarzschild radius (where the escape velocity = c)? If so, why do these seemingly unrelated limits match?  Or... does the existing neutron star's radius exceed the resultant black hole's radius? In other words, does neutron degeneracy pressure fail, and as the the neutron star's radius decreases when collapsing, does it eventually reach a smaller (than in the previous scenario) Schwarzschild radius? If this is the case, what is the "in-between" state of matter as the neutron star collapses into a black hole?  Thank you!
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We know from big bang nucleosynthesis that baryonic matter accounts for about 5% of the universe's total mass-energy density. What is the current best estimate of how much of this is in the form of stars? I'm guessing that this would be known only very roughly. It seems like you would just have to survey large volumes of space for stars and larger structures made out of stars. Although galaxies may pretty efficiently cycle their hydrogen and helium through stars, I would assume that there is a lot of hydrogen out there in the spaces between superclusters that has never had a chance to form a star and never will.  related: