There's a disturbance in the force, but this time it's coming from scientists.
Disney's new "Star Wars" movie, "The Force Awakens," picks up years beyond where the last film in the series, "Return of the Jedi," left off: after the cataclysmic explosion of Death Star II, a moon-size weapon.
The colossal ship orbited the forest world Endor and, after it blows up, the Rebel Alliance and its hairy Ewok friends party in the trees. Everyone and everything is hunky-dory.
Until you ask a physicist — or a dozen, as Tech Insider did — what happens when you detonate a giant metal sphere above a lush green world. The answer is downright chilling.
"The Ewoks are dead. All of them," said one researcher and self-professed "Star Wars" fan, who wrote a white paper exclusively for Tech Insider.
Each scientist who responded to our emails quibbled over the exact details, yet a strong consensus emerged in support of a popular fan theory: The "Endor Holocaust" is inevitable, and a threat to the plausibility of any future movies (galactic bankruptcy be damned).
Here's why.
The "Endor Holocaust" fan theory dates back to 1997, when it first appeared on a website called TheForce.net.
Source: TheForce.net
Curtis Saxton, an astrophysicist and "Star Wars" super-fan, wrote it as part of a technical series that analyzes the movies frame-by-frame with scientific rigor.
Source: TheForce.net
Saxon's 10,000-word essay about the Endor holocaust claims that the doom of Endor and the Ewoks who live there "is an inevitable consequence of observable facts."
Source: TheForce.net
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