Considering the Death Star ’s blasting design flaw , it ’s hardly surprising that the Empire develop a rather ineffective way to blow up planets . According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel , the monumental - green - push - irradiation approach might look cool , but to get the caper done powerful , you need something else .
That would be antimatter .
Writing at his web log , protrude With A Bang ! , Siegel observes that the amount of Energy Department required to demolish Alderaan ( 2.24 × 10 ^ 32 Joules ) would , by means of simple warmth diffusion , melt all the equipment around it . And , can that much energy in a specific direction should have do a massive recoil . Either that kick was edit out of the “ historical footage ” of the Death Star ’s tone-beginning , or some luxuriant engineering , consuming vast amounts of extra force , would be necessary to keep the massive blank space station from zipping backwards like a synodic month - sized billiard bollock .
However , a mere 1.24 trillion metric ton of antimatter ( the deal of a small asteroid ) would have been sufficient to destruct Princess Leia ’s adopted rest home world . The tough part would be storing that much antimatter in a Death Star - sized object . But here ’s the thing : just like thing binds to itself through the electromagnetic force and — if you get a turgid amount of “ stuff ” together — through gravity , antimatter comport exactly in the same way .
As Siegelexplains :
We ’ve been able to create neutral antimatter and store it , successfully , for reasonably long periods of sentence : not mere picosecond , microseconds or even milliseconds , but long enough that it ’s only our bankruptcy to keep normal subject aside from it that stimulate it to annihilate in short order .
It is n’t unreasonable that an advanced technical culture — one that ’s mastered hyperdrive and immobile - than - light travel — could harness , say , the energy from an uninhabited star and expend it to get electroneutral antimatter . The path we do it on Earth in particle gas is relatively unsubdivided : we collide protons with other protons at high energies , bring forth three protons and one antiproton as a result . That antiproton could then be merged with a positron to bring forth neutral antihydrogen . You might bid for rocky , crystalline structures based on elements like Si or C , but under the right conditions , hydrogen can produce a quartz glass - similar social structure .
In the inside of gas colossus like Jupiter and Saturn , the fabulously thick atomic number 1 atmosphere extends down for tens of thousands of kilometers . Whereas the pressure at Earth ’s atmosphere is around 100,000 Pascals ( where a Pascal is a N / m^2 ) , at pressures of tens of Gigapascals ( or 10 ^ 10 Pascals ) , hydrogen can enter a metallic phase , something that should no doubt materialize in the interiors of gas giant planets .
If we could attain this state of matter , atomic number 1 would actually become an electric conductor , and is thought to be creditworthy for the acute charismatic field of Jupiter . All the law of purgative suggest that if this is how matter behaves , and we can do this with H , then this must also be how antimatter — and hence , antihydrogen — behaves , too .
So all it would take , if you want to demolish an ( Earth - like ) planet like Alderaan , is a slight over a trillion t of metal antihydrogen , and to transport it down to the major planet ’s surface . Once it hits the planet ’s Earth’s surface , it should have no trouble clearing a path down near the core , where the denseness are highest .
See ? That ’s not so voiceless .
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