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star wars - How is Starkiller Base's beam visible from Takodana in The Force Awakens?


On Takodana,




the main characters and various bar patrons can see the planet Hosnian Prime being destroyed by Starkiller Base with their (respective) naked eyes. How did they see this? Is the Hosnian system close enough to see? If it's not very close and they could just see the explosion, how did the light from it reach them so quickly?




Answer



This is explained in the film's Junior Novelisation. The super-weapon is capable of firing a beam that travels faster than light. Evidently it also creates an effect that can be seen faster than light, explaining why people in other systems can see it in realtime:



Outside the castle with Chewbacca, Han surveyed a section of Takodana’s sky through a compact ponipin telescope. He’d heard many theories about the origin of the star that had recently blinked into existence. None made any sense. New stellar bodies didn’t just brighten the sky all of a sudden.


Han’s ponipin measured that the new star was also many, many light-years away, which under normal astronomical circumstances meant that it had actually blazed to life years before. Moreover, if the calculations proved correct, the stellar coordinates happened to be the same as those of the Hosnian system, where the capital of the New Republic was located.


Could the Hosnian system have gone nova? Could it—dare he even consider—have been destroyed? And if so, how had it happened so quickly?





This was confirmed in a tweet by the film's Creative Executive, Pablo Hidalgo


Apparently the explosions were...



... Some weird-ass hyperspace-rip seen-across-the-cosmos kinda shit.



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