The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portraye by Cavelos Jeanne

Author:Cavelos, Jeanne [Cavelos, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

A GALACTIC PIT STOP?

The main problem with propulsion is getting the fuel we need and dragging it around with us. In our galaxy, fuel is not floating conveniently out in space where we can simply pull over for a fill-up. But what if, in “a galaxy far, far away,” it were?

If interstellar hydrogen was more plentiful, Dr. Bussard’s idea to scoop that hydrogen up to fuel fusion engines might be more practical. Or if antimatter were easily available, Han Solo could have a free source of concentrated energy. Is it possible that another galaxy might have conditions that make interstellar travel much easier than it is in our Milky Way?

Actually, we don’t have to leave our galaxy to find plentiful sources of fuel. Near the center of our own galaxy we can find both dense clouds of interstellar hydrogen and plumes of antimatter.

Our galaxy is a huge spinning disk of stars, planets, gas, and dust 130,000 light-years across. Among the 100 billion galaxies in our universe, the Milky Way is fairly average, with about 200 billion stars. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, as 70 percent of all galaxies are, with long arms of stars and dust curling out from the galactic core. Our solar system is 25,000 light-years from the core, out on one of the spiral arms. Conditions on the arm are fairly tame. Yet as we move toward the galactic center, conditions become much more dangerous and unpredictable.

The disk of the galaxy bulges in the center with a dense conglomeration of stars several thousand light-years across. As we move through this region toward the galactic core, we find clouds of dust one hundred times more dense than in our neighborhood, pockets of free fuel. Stars whizz about the galactic center at a dizzying one-half the speed of light, packed in a million times more densely. Torrents of high-energy radiation blast out from the core, and intense magnetic fields crisscross the area. At the very center, the dynamo driving all this activity is a black hole or several black holes about two million times more massive than the sun.

These black holes are believed to be the source of antimatter discovered just last year. Dr. William Purcell of Northwestern University found a plume of positrons shooting out from the center of our galaxy. This discovery suggests there may be other antimatter sources in the universe. If a source of antimatter were close to us, and we could develop a safe way of harvesting it, we might use it as a fuel to power our ships. Since we already have safe ways to store the small amounts of antimatter we’ve created, harvesting and storing the antimatter seems like something we could do. The difficult part would be surviving annihilation if there was a natural source of antimatter nearby. Dr. Visser thinks that could be a problem. “You don’t want to find too much around, or that would make life difficult in that vicinity.” Curiously, scientists have found no evidence of large quantities of antimatter in the galaxies nearest to us.

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