I'm not sure the planet would actually explode, but the laser would probably rearrange it." Then heat the core so it expands and melts. Stuart Penn, senior research fellow at South Bank University in London, suggests another way a laser might destroy a planet: "The laser could vaporize a narrow tunnel to the core of the planet. But perhaps we don't need to vaporize it.
To vaporize a planet, we'd need a laser with a billion trillion times the energy of MIRACL. That energy source takes space, which the Death Star, at least, provides. While we can create lasers that emit extremely powerful energies, we need to pump great energies into them to make them work. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size. We could injure or kill people we could burn structures or melt holes in walls we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. But researchers say the laser could just as easily have melted it. MlRACL purposely did not destroy the satellite, since the test was designed merely to show that the laser could target and hit the satellite. In a 1998 test, MlRACL, a 2.2-megawatt laser, was able to hit a satellite in Earth orbit.
A series of pulses can drill through hard materials like titanium or diamond.Ī megawatt laser can burn a hole through a jet up to six miles away-though it needs to maintain contact with the aircraft for one to two seconds.
The amplified light of lasers can also be very powerful. Lasers can produce a steady beam for long periods, or they can produce a very intense beam in short pulses, occurring thousands or millions of times per second. While a laser is basically just light, it is light that can be focused onto a precise spot and can have high, extremely concentrated power. The Death Star's planet-destroying weapon is said in the Star Wars Encyclopedia to be a super-laser. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the 1999 book The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos.
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