Death Star Firepower

Exactly how powerful is the Death Star? With a little bit of physics and a little bit of math, we can determine just how much power you would need in order to blow up a planet.
Let's start with what we know. The Death Star is capable of destroying any inhabitable planet in the galaxy, blasting it into rubble and hurling the rubble into space at fantastic speeds. This is one of the central defining events of the Star Wars trilogy. In fact, not only did we see the planet Alderaan destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion, but we also saw Han Solo arrive a few minutes later, only to see nothing but a light "meteor shower." This indicates that not only was the planet destroyed, but most of its mass was already dispersed far away from its original location.

What a great article! I particularly like how the summerise the results; ...we have now determined a lower limit (2.2E32 joules) and upper limit (3.7E32 joules) for the gravitational binding energy of an Earth-like planet. If we want to improve the accuracy of our estimates even further, we have to account for the planetary density gradient in the planet.....