The Death Star is the gargantuan cosmic aircraft carrier, the size of a moon as well as a lethal weapon. Crewed with 1.7 million military personnel and 400,000 droids, it’s capable of blowing up planets to smithereens.
In the first “Star Wars” movie, released in 1977, it fires a fluorescent green beam at princess Leia’s home planet, Alderaan. Immediately, it explodes into a cloud of dust and disappears.
To effect destruction of that magnitude, the Death Star would have to subdue the very force that holds it together—its gravitational force. It would have to send its way a jaw-dropping 2.24 × 10^32 joules of energy. Even the sun’s total daily energy output, which is 3.8 × 10^26 watts, is less than that.
If we assume that the Death Star fires a laser that packs 2.24 × 103^2 joules of energy, per the law of action and reaction (“for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction”), it should’ve hurtled away in the opposite direction, when it activated its guns. But it doesn’t recoil.
It stands to reason then that it must’ve brought about the annihilation in another way.
Since Alderaan is made of matter, it’s most likely that the Death Star lobbed pure antimatter at it.
As “matter and antimatter are like the good and evil twins of nature,” writes Dennis Overbye in the New York Times, they’re endowed with equal and opposite traits like charge and spin. So, if they meet, “they obliterate each other, releasing a flash of energy upon contact.”
Also: It would require very little antimatter to destroy the planet. If a star of an average size, such as Vega, were made of antimatter, it could undo an entire galaxy of the size of the Milky Way.
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