7 Happy Movie Endings That Are Totally Ruined By Science

3. Star Wars: Death Star Explosion Would Have Been Catastrophic

"The Ewoks are dead. All of them."

So begins the white paper detailing the extinction event known as the Endor Holocaust.

Far from the triumphant finale it appears to be, the destruction of the Death Star would have heralded the apocalypse for the poor unfortunate creatures on the surface of Endor.

The main threat to the inhabitants of Endor would probably not be the destruction itself, but the shrapnel. By calculating the relative size and orbits of both Endor and the Death Star, the paper's author manages to deduce that the fragments from the destroyed ship would not be moving at the required velocity to keep them in orbit.

In other words, they go screaming towards the moonlike fiery meteors.

It is estimated that a Death Star-sized mass of debris falling from the sky would create an impact crater 700km wide, four times the size of the Chicxulub crater formed by the impact that killed the dinosaurs on Earth.

The impact would flatten everything on the surface. To add insult to injury, as the material that was thrown into the air by the impact reenters the atmosphere, it will superheat it to the point that all water on the surface vapourises. Anything that didn't die in the cataclysm certainly will eventually.