Scientists are backing up the most terrifying fan theory in the 'Star Wars' universe

There's a disturbance in the force, but this time it's coming from scientists.

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Disney's new "Star Wars" movie, "The Force Awakens," picks up years beyond where the last film in the series, "Return of the Jedi," left off: after the cataclysmic explosion of Death Star II, a moon-size weapon.

The colossal ship orbited the forest world Endor and, after it blows up, the Rebel Alliance and its hairy Ewok friends party in the trees. Everyone and everything is hunky-dory.

millennium falcon escape explosion
The Death Star II explodes into smithereens.
Disney/Lucasfilm

Until you ask a physicist — or a dozen, as Tech Insider did — what happens when you detonate a giant metal sphere above a lush green world. The answer is downright chilling.

"The Ewoks are dead. All of them," said one researcher and self-professed "Star Wars" fan, who wrote a white paper exclusively for Tech Insider.

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Each scientist who responded to our emails quibbled over the exact details, yet a strong consensus emerged in support of a popular fan theory: The "Endor Holocaust" is inevitable, and a threat to the plausibility of any future movies (galactic bankruptcy be damned).

Here's why.

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The "Endor Holocaust" fan theory dates back to 1997, when it first appeared on a website called TheForce.net.

theforce star wars technical commentaries
TheForce.net

Source: TheForce.net

Curtis Saxton, an astrophysicist and "Star Wars" super-fan, wrote it as part of a technical series that analyzes the movies frame-by-frame with scientific rigor.

imperial storm troopers
Disney/Lucasfilm

Source: TheForce.net

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Saxon's 10,000-word essay about the Endor holocaust claims that the doom of Endor and the Ewoks who live there "is an inevitable consequence of observable facts."

death star orbits endor moon rebel fleet
Disney/Lucasfilm

Source: TheForce.net

Yes, these cuddly-wuddly warmongering Ewoks.

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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The rebels' attack on the Death Star turns it into fine metallic bits, Saxton argues. The debris then rains down on Endor, burns up into a toxic sooty fallout, and sparks global firestorms.

death star lights up explosion
Disney/Lucasfilm

Source: TheForce.net

But many of Saxton's various measurements are open to interpretation, since depictions of the Death Star, Endor, and other details are inconsistent from one scene to the next.

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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Hoping to settle the matter, we asked 11 physicists the question, "What would happen to Endor if the Death Star blew up?"

death star explodes question
Disney/Lucasfilm

Almost all of them responded right away.

mathematicians dave mosher
Copyright Dave Mosher
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Planetary scientist Sarah Stewart was optimistic: "I think Endor survives. ... After some environmental cleanup [of the fallout], the forest moon would return to its idyllic state," she told Tech Insider.

endor forest moon surface
Disney/Lucasfilm
Source: UC Davis

 

Responses after that, however, were grim.

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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Matija Cuk, who studies orbital dynamics, said the Death Star's reactor blows up the satellite in about 1 second. This would eject huge chunks of debris at 220,000mph, or six times faster than humanity's speediest spacecraft.

death star nuclear core
Disney/Lucasfilm
Source: SETI

 

"The energy carried by the debris would not be enough to destroy the moon," Cuk told Tech Insider, "but it would heavily erode the side facing the Death Star."

death star orbits endor moon
Disney/Lucasfilm
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The high-speed chunks would obliterate "[a]ll ships close to the Death Star, imperial or rebel," Cuk said. "This is particularly true for Millennium Falcon and Luke's shuttle" — both would be goners.

luke skywalker c3po
Disney/Lucasfilm

"Since the rebels on the Forest Moon are just underneath [the Death Star] ... I suspect that they would be dead from radiation released by the explosion before the debris even reaches them," he said.

death star explodes endor surface
Disney/Lucasfilm
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After the radiation bath, high-speed debris would hit the ground, throwing rocks to the far side of the moon. "Extinction of [the] Ewoks appears inevitable," Cuk concluded.

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Disney/Lucasfilm

Planetary physicist Erik Asphaug, who studies giant impacts with moons and planets, refused to believe most of the Death Star would vaporize or turn into tiny bits upon exploding.

death star explodes aftermath
Disney/Lucasfilm

 

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"Nuclear explosions in rock tend to vaporize the stuff nearby, melt the stuff a bit further away, and then break stuff farther away mechanically. The farther away, the less broken the bits become," Asphaug told Tech Insider.

nuclear bomb
An atomic bomb test.
Public domain

"So, I predict there will be huge chunks of the Death Star raining down on the Ewoks that might make their life unpleasant," he said — plenty big enough to reach the ground and make craters.

meteor crater nasa
NASA
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Yet Asphaug said the biggest problem for the Ewoks on a dense forest moon might be fire.

yosemite park wildfire epa noah berger
EPA/Noah Berger

"If thousands of wildfires go off at once, even if limited to one half of the planet, much of the surface will be a charred ruin," he said. "Their parties and celebrations will quickly change into emergency procedures to survive what could be a horrible nightmare."

endor fire forest ewok
Disney/Lucasfilm
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The most detailed (and frightening) response came from planetary scientist Dave Minton, who sent Tech Insider an exclusive four-page treatise. It begins: "The Ewoks are dead. All of them."

The white paper is based on a detailed, to-scale hologram projected in "Return of the Jedi."

death star endor hologram map shield generator
Disney/Lucasfilm
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From that image Minton used physics equations to extrapolate diameters, masses, velocities, and orbital paths of Endor and the Death Star.

death star endor hologram map 4
Disney/Lucasfilm

He also assumes that — since Ewoks, storm troopers, and rebels move like they do here on Earth — that the gravity of Endor is the same as our planet.

Earth from Space
Reuters/Alexander Gerst/NASA
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"I estimate that the bulk density of Endor is about 14,350 kg/m3," he told Tech Insider. "This is more than iron (8000 kg/m3) and less than uranium (19,100 kg/m3), so while the composition of Endor must be quite unusual, it is not impossible."

kilauea lava flow flickr z2amiller ccbysa2
z2amiller/Flickr (CC BY SA 2.0)

Minton figured out that the Death Star is in a bizarrely stable orbit, since it's too near the moon and moving too slowly.

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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"So I have to assume that the Death Star is being maintained in its position using something like [anti-gravity] repulsorlifts," he wrote.

death star core
Disney/Lucasfilm

When the rebels and Ewoks destroy the shield generator on Endor — a device that protected the Death Star — Minton assumes the repulsorlifts there got destroyed, too.

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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He also assumes, like Asphaug, that the Death Star is not vaporized and mostly shatters into a field of loose rubble.

asteroid collision rubble nasa
NASA/JPL-Caltech

"[M]ore or less what happens after the destruction is that the entire mass of the Death Star simply falls onto the location of the shield generator," he said.

asteroid impact strike hit nasa
NASA/Don Davis
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Minton said the falling rubble field would look something like this animation of a colossal asteroid striking the Earth:

Striking Endor at more than 6,000mph, Minton said "a Death Star-mass ball of fragments will leave behind a 700 km diameter crater. This is almost 4 times larger than the Chicxulub crater in Mexico that is associated with the dinosaur extinction."

chicxulub crater nasa
NASA
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"The aftermath of this impact would be to obliterate everything on the surface. No Ewok could withstand an impact of that magnitude."

"It is likely that the atmosphere would be so heated up ... that every body of water on the entire world would be flash heated to steam, and every forest would ignite into a global firestorm."

molten planet nasa
NASA
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In short, not good. At all.

endor moon han solo leia rebels
Disney/Lucasfilm

There is one glimmer of hope for the Ewoks and the Rebel Alliance, though.

star wars lando calrissian
Disney/Lucasfilm
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Another superfan named Gary M. Sarli (who is not a physicist) closely analyzed the Death Star's explosion.

death star explodes millennium falcon escape
Disney/Lucasfilm

Source: The Truth about the "Endor Holocaust"

Sarli calculated that the blast imploded inward instead of flying outward.

death star endor explosion analysis.JPG
Gary M. Sarli

Source: The Truth about the "Endor Holocaust"

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Which implies a wormhole formed as the Death Star's reactor blew, rapidly transporting almost all of the debris to another corner of the galaxy — and away from Endor.

wormhole
SISSA - International School for Advanced Studies

Source: The Truth about the "Endor Holocaust"

If true, the Ewoks survive, Luke and Han Solo escape, the Rebel Alliance lives to fight another day...

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Disney/Lucasfilm
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...And the "Star Wars" series remains intact for a future that's full of epic stories.

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One more thing...

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Disney/Lucasfilm

If you're a planetary scientist or physicist who can run simulations that test ideas critical to the Endor Holocaust theory, Tech Insider would love to hear from you.

Please reach out to us at science@techinsider.io with "Endor Holocaust simulation" as the subject line.

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