While fans celebrated the 40th anniversary of Star Wars this past May, Georgetown University assistant professor Patrick Johnson pieced clues together that narrows down the timeframe slightly, claiming that the events couldn’t have taken place more than 4.7 billion years ago.
“The best theories that we have indicate that our universe is about 13.7 billion years old,” Johnson shared in his book The Physics of Star Wars: The Science Behind a Galaxy Far, Far Away. “Assuming the Star Wars galaxy is in our universe, we need a few indicators to determine when in our universe’s history Star Wars could occur.”
“The first galaxies were formed around a billion years after the big bang, so that cuts out a billion years. The films depict many star systems with mature planets and intelligent life. It took the solar system about 500 million years to form, and it formed 4.6 billion years ago, so it’s reasonable to assume that Star Wars is about 5 billion years after the formation of the first galaxy.”
“Altogether, this means that Star Wars needs to be at least 9 billion years after the big bang,” Johnson notes. “This leaves plenty of years before the current time (about 4.7 billion to be precise), so it could still count as ‘a long time ago,’ but it is certainly closer to now than to the big bang.”
It only took 40 years for someone to attempt to figure out what the actual time frame to Star Wars really was.
