Physics and Star Wars
To estimate the effects of the second Death Star, Minton looks into its mass. According to estimated data from some students of Lehigh University, the steel mass needed for building one would be around 770 kilograms times the mass cubed in weight. This would give the Death Star of about ten to the power of nineteen kilograms in mass. Using this data, Minton produces equations that lead him to conclude the fragments would hit the moons surface so hard causing craters almost four times the size of the Chicxulub crater in Mexico. This impact would cause a planetary firestorm and vaporize all lifeforms on the moon.
Neutron star
A neutron star has a mass of at least 1.1 and perhaps up to 3 solar masses (). The maximum observed mass of neutron stars is about . But in general, compact stars of less than (the Chandrasekhar limit) are white dwarfs, whereas compact stars with a mass between and (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) should be neutron stars (though there is an interval of a few tenths of a solar mass where the masses of low-mass neutron stars and high-mass white dwarfs can overlap). Between and , hypothetical intermediate-mass stars such as quark stars and electroweak stars have been proposed, but none have been shown to exist. Beyond the stellar remnant will overcome the neutron degeneracy pressure and gravitational collapse will usually occur to produce a black hole, though the smallest observed mass of a stellar black hole is about .