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.
Stellar mass
With a mass only 93 times that of Jupiter (), or .09 , AB Doradus C, a companion to AB Doradus A, is the smallest known star undergoing nuclear fusion in its core. For stars with similar metallicity to the Sun, the theoretical minimum mass the star can have, and still undergo fusion at the core, is estimated to be about 75 . When the metallicity is very low, however, a recent study of the faintest stars found that the minimum star size seems to be about 8.3% of the solar mass, or about 87 . Smaller bodies are called brown dwarfs, which occupy a poorly defined grey area between stars and gas giants.