abstract
| - In the real world, a parsec is a measurement of distance based on apparent stellar motion as observed from Earth. It is defined as 360×60×60/2π astronomical units (AU), which is equivalent to about 19.17 trillion miles, or about 3.262 light-years. The Star Wars parsec appears to be equivalent to the real-world measurement: The "Decoded" version of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode "Dooku Captured" says that six parsecs equals about 114 trillion miles, making one parsec about 19 trillion miles. The Essential Atlas says a parsec is 3.26 light-years. If the Star Wars galaxy is similar in size to ours, roughly 30,000 parsecs across, elementary arithmetic shows that any ship capable of traveling across the galaxy in only a few weeks could travel about a parsec per minute. However, in The Courtship of Princess Leia, it takes more than a week to travel a distance of only seventy parsecs (the stated distance between Dathomir and Coruscant), and in Attack of the Clones, it seems to take many hours to travel the distance between Tatooine and Geonosis, which is stated to be less than a parsec. However, the map Amidala shows Anakin while talking about the distance only seems to zoom about tenfold from the entire galaxy, implying that either the Star Wars galaxy is very small (which seems unlikely, since no night sky seems to show the huge numbers of visible stars that would be consistent with the corresponding smaller interstellar distances), or Amidala misspoke. The latter would make more sense from a statistical standpoint, since the odds of two random planets in the galaxy being within a parsec of each other are about one to a hundred billion.
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