10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The Death Star
7. There's A Real One Orbiting Saturn (Sort Of)
The Cassini probe brought back clear pictures of Saturn's moon Iapetus in 2007, and immediately sent the world of astronomers into spasms of glorious nerd joy. This was because the moon's features were eerily, wonderfully familiar to those of cinema's favourite moon-sized death machine.
Iapetus has an enormous crater, named Turgis, giving it a very Death Star-like huge sunken region corresponding to the laser projector on the 'real' thing. One of the many mysteries of Iapetus is how it could be hit by something large enough to leave such an immense crater, without completely destroying Iapetus in the process.
If that wasn't enough to please the stargazing geeks of the world, it has a prominent equatorial ridge, an echo of the Death Star's equatorial trench.
Iapetus is mostly composed of ice and is of great interest to planetary scientists because of the way it illustrates the formation of bodies within Saturn's ring system, but let's be honest, they love it mainly because it looks like the Death Star.