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Parsec
Physical and technical specifications
Length
Usage and history
Purpose
- "It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."
- ―Han Solo, referring to theMillennium Falcon[3]
Aparsec was a unit of distance equal to 3.258light-years. The system used bystarship navigators throughoutthe galaxy to record the location ofstar systems was based on parsecs, with one unit on the coordinate scale corresponding to 15 parsecs.[1]
Behind the scenes[]
In the real world, aparsec is a measurement of distance based on apparent stellar motion as observed from Earth. It is defined as 360×60×60/2πastronomical units (AU), which is equivalent to about 19.17 trillion miles, or about 3.262light-years.
TheStar Wars parsec appears to be equivalent to the real-world measurement:The Essential Atlas says a parsec is 3.26 light-years.[5] The "Decoded" version of theStar Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Dooku Captured" says that six parsecs equals about 114 trillion miles, making one parsec about 19 trillion miles.
IftheStar Wars galaxy is similar in size toours, roughly 30,000 parsecs across, elementary arithmetic shows that any ship capable of traveling across the galaxy in only a few weeks could travel about a parsec per minute. However, inThe Courtship of Princess Leia, it takes more than a week to travel only seventy parsecs (the stated distance betweenDathomir andCoruscant), and inAttack of the Clones, it seems to take many hours to travel the distance between Tatooine and Geonosis, which is stated to be less than a parsec. However, the map Amidala shows Anakin while talking about the distance only seems to zoom about tenfold from the entire galaxy, implying that eithertheStar Wars galaxy is very small (which seems unlikely, since no night sky seems to show the huge numbers of visible stars that would be consistent with the corresponding smaller interstellar distances), or Amidala misspoke. The latter is statistically more likely, since the odds of two random planets in the galaxy being within a parsec of each other are about one in a hundred billion.
A New Hope error?[]
InStar Wars: Episode IVA New Hope,Han Solo boasted about the speed of hisspaceship by claiming it made theKessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, despite a parsec being a unit of distance. (In thenovelization, he said, "less than twelve standard timeparts."[6]) ScreenwriterGeorge Lucas claimed the seeming gaffe was intentional, showing that Han was something of a bull artist who didn't always know precisely what he was talking about.[7]
Within theExpanded Universe,Kevin J. Anderson laterretconned an explanation: the Kessel Run is throughthe Maw. Event horizons around black holes are dependent on the speed at which you are traveling. A standard ship has to do the run in eighteen parsecs because to cut the route any closer, the ship would get sucked in.
TheFalcon, however, is fast enough to straighten the route and cut over six parsecs off the distance traveled.
The director's commentary on the Blu-RayStar Wars set explains that hyperspace travel requires heavy computation to compute a path that does not cause you to fly through a star. TheMillennium Falcon has customized computation engines that calculate shorter hyperspace paths more quickly than those in other ships. Shorter distances mean faster travel times. TheFalcon reduces travel times by a combination of being faster in a traditional sense, and by using more accurate navigation calculations.
Appearances[]
Non-canon appearances[]
- Jedi Academy: Return of the Padawan(Mentioned only)
