Star Wars' Planet Mustafar Shares Similarities With A Moon In Our Solar System
At the end of the 2005 film "Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith," the young Jedi Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), desperate for the power to save his wife from a destined death-by-childbirth, had fully given over to the dark side of the Force. He had pledged his allegiance to the fascist Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and was determined to become his evil acolyte under the name Darth Vader. This was devastating to Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), who had known Anakin since he was a child and who spent many years training him to be a benevolent member of the Jedi Order. The two confronted one another on a molten world poxy with volcanos called Mustafar, and a lightsaber fight — a very, very long lightsaber fight — ensued.
The fight ended when Obi-Wan had the high ground (physically, not necessarily morally) and cut off Anakin's arms and legs (!). He was left to burn to death right next to a river of lava. It was only through the evil Emperor's interference, as well as some hasty sci-fi surgery, that Anakin was saved. He was locked into a survival suit, given a full-mask respirator, and emerged from the operating theater as the Darth Vader we all know and love today.
For the purposes of this article, though, let us focus not on the vicious injuries and forced mutilations, but on that aforementioned planet of lava. "Star Wars" has always been very good at presenting a wonderful variety of biomes on its varied alien worlds, including desert planets, forest planets, icy planets, and swamp planets, each with its own unique flora and fauna. Mustafar, a volcanic world, might resemble a real moon in our own solar system — namely Io, one of the four largest moons of Jupiter.
Io, the third-largest of Jupiter's Galilean moons
Back in 1610, looking through a telescope at the University of Padua, Galileo Galilei first glimpsed the four largest moons of Jupiter, confirming that the largest planet in our solar system did indeed have satellites of its own. That a planet could have its own moons went a long way to support Copernicus' theory that the solar system was heliocentric and not geocentric as many scientists at the time believed. Galileo merely named the four moons I, II, III, and IV. He was a diligent astronomer, that Galileo, but he wasn't wholly creative when it came to naming moons. It would be Johannes Kepler who suggested that the moons be given names of mythological figures closely related to the god Jupiter. Hence, he named them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
In the ensuing centuries, more and more information has been gathered on the four Galilean moons, and each has emerged as a unique world with its own notable features. Callisto is pocked with craters, Ganymede has a unique magnetic field, Europa seems to have potential to support life, and Io — about the size of Earth's moon — is covered all over with volcanoes. Io seems to be the kind of volcanic planet George Lucas was thinking about when he wrote and directed "Revenge of the Sith."
In 2019, Stanford University talked to several expert professors about the science of "Star Wars," mostly just for fun, trying to suss out the sci-fi universe's actual astral physics. Geophysics professor Sonia Tikoo-Schantz and Earth and Planetary Sciences professor Laura Schaefer were asked about Mustafar, and they immediately thought of Io. They talked a little bit about what a volcanic world would need in order to survive.
No fighting on Io
Tikoo-Schnatz suggested a way that Io — and by extension, Mustafar — might have formed. It seems that volcanos can form as a result of massive gravitational stress. Tikoo-Schnatz explained:
"Such a volcanic planet can exist from tidal heating. A comparable world would be Jupiter's moon Io, which gets flexed on the inside by the gravitational pull of Jupiter and other Jovian moons. The resulting stress releases a lot of heat. However, the gases in the atmosphere of such a volcanic world would be noxious and surface temperatures would likely be too hot for anything to survive, much less get in a fight."
One might assume that the beings in "Star Wars" possess some kind of terraforming technology that makes the atmosphere of Mustafar breathable. Force fields allowed characters to surf across the lava, so high temperatures were handled.
Schaefer expanded, saying:
"We have also found some exoplanets that orbit their stars so closely that they have permanent dayside magma oceans. But as Sonia said, the temperatures are so hot that you'd burn to a crisp before you got to have your Jedi duel."
The origin of Mustafar, meanwhile, was explained in the 2019 video game "Vader Immortal: Episode I." It seems that Mustafar was once a verdant, Eden-like world that drew life-sustaining energies from a magical crystal called the Bright Star. A woman named Lady Corvax stole the Bright Star, hoping to use it to power an elaborate machine called the Aeon Engine, which might have the ability to resurrect her dead husband. True to life, the gravitational pressure from a pair of nearby gas giants called Jestefad and Lefrani transformed Mustafar into a volcano-ridden world.
In other words, Mustafar is 100% real and NASA plans to visit it shortly.