HoSV Astronomy:  The Kessel Run in Less than Twelve Parsecs.

You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

                                                        – Han Solo   

I’m sure we’ve all heard this before but what exactly is Han Solo saying?  A parsec is a measure of distance like a mile as opposed to a unit of time such as an hour.  Therefore saying that you made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs is as nonsensical as claiming to have finished the Indy 500 in less than 500 miles or the Boston Marathon in less than 26 miles.  The Indy 500 is by definition 500 miles and a marathon is 26 miles.  You can’t finish in less, not unless you’re a cheat.  Diehard Star Wars fans have two explanations for this apparent blunder.  The first is that Han Solo was attempting to bamboozled the incredulous old man and the country bumpkin farm boy with some impressive sounding technobabble.  But on a world where people brandish lightsabers and walk around with smart-alecky effeminate robots who would be so gullible as to be fooled by such an obvious falsehood?

The second explanation is that Han Solo in piloting the Millennium Falcon was able to successfully traverse a perilous shortcut near a black hole thus shaving distance off the journey.  This doesn’t make much sense either since the question asked by Obi-Wan Kenobi was if the Millennium Falcon was a fast ship to which Han Solo boastfully replied, “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. I’ve outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I’m talking about the big Corellian ships now. She’s fast enough for you old man.”

Clearly Han Solo is talking about flat-out speed not timesaving shortcuts.  But in any case who’s parsec is Solo referring to?  Star Wars is set “A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.”  It therefore follows that Solo and his friends would have no knowledge of Earth what so ever and without Earth we have no way of determining the length of a parsec.   

The Earth’s astronomical unit (au) is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun.  It’s roughly 93 million miles.  Over the course of 6 months our world will travel half way around the sun and thus shift it’s position relative to our star by 186 million miles. 186 million miles is a trifling amount compared to the staggering  distances of interstellar space, but it’s just enough to show a slight shift in apparent position of the nearer stars relative to the far more distant background stars.

This is the result of viewing an object along two different lines of sight and is so small that the unit of angle is measured not in degrees or in arc-minutes of but in arc-seconds.  There are 360 degrees in a circle and one degree is equal to 3600 arc-seconds.  The word Parsec was first used in print in 1913 and is nothing more than a portmanteau of the words parallax arc-second.  A parsec is 3.26 light years or about 19 trillion miles.    

But the mean distance from the sun to Mars is 141.67 million miles.  Therefore a Martian (if such a creature exists) would define the astronomical unit as 141.67 million miles and hence his definition of a parsec would differ from our own by a factor of 1.524.  So what planet or moon is used in the Star Wars universe to calculate a parsec?  Is it Naboo or Endor or Tatooine or perhaps Coruscant?  I can’t help but wonder.