And according to one of those “experts comment on how movies treat their area of expertise” videos that everyone is making these days, the explosion would be visible for about a microsecond (i.e., not visible), with no roiling cloud of flame, and as @HMS_Irruncible says, no shock wave, visible or otherwise, since there’s no medium through which to propagate a wave.
Thank you.
Yeah. In open space a nuke is pretty much a very brief (milliseconds) very bright source of high energy X-rays and some goodly number of high energy neutrons and such. Which X-rays propagate at c, and the other stuff more slowly but still very quickly.
If your target can be damaged or killed by high power X-ray illumination nukes are a fine space weapon. Otherwise not so much.
Planetary lowish orbital space has the additional complexity of your nuke interacting with the planetary magnetic field, plus the solar wind. Which might give more ways for the weapon to couple mayhem into the target.
IIRC nukes in space really aren’t all that dangerous. Nukes on earth cause damage through the shockwave. There is no shockwave in space. Either you are within the blast radius of the nuke or you aren’t. In space, a 1/2 mile diameter fireball isn’t all that big. Even one mile diameter is not much. On earth that would be devastating.
Overall I agree completely. When dropping conventional bombs from airplanes it always stuck me how large the Earth is and how tiny the explosion. Nukes are of course bigger explosions, but space is a LOT bigger than the Earth.
OTOH, a 1/4 mile lethal radius would be a ginormous volume compared to that of a chemical explosion with associated shrapnel casing. Which larger lethal volume greatly simplifies the targeting and fuzing accuracy required to get a kill.
Would there be a electromagnetic pulse to fry the computers and the microwave of the baddies’ spaceship? That should work in the vaccum of space, right?
Anyway, I agree with Chronos: two polar jets are much cooler than one equatorial ring, and be it on Alderaan.
EMP is a result of the energetic charged particles of the explosion interacting with the magnetic field of the planet. Which serves as a large amplifier and a large area-spreader-outer.
As I said a couple posts ago, but perhaps too obliquely, that might be a factor for an enemy ship and nuke both in near-planet orbit over a planet with a material magnetic field. But not at all for a battle in the vast empty spaces away from the planets within a solar system, much less the even vaster emptiness of interstellar space.
That’s ridiculous.
We already know what a nuclear explosion looks like in space, and have films of it:
It’s visible for many seconds.
A lot of that was the interaction with the tenuous atmosphere and magnetic field.
Again there are 4 cases: explosions in low orbit, high orbit, interplanetary space, and interstellar space. Starfish prime was at ~250 miles, so low-ish orbit
Which are we discussing?
Two things: as @LSLGuy points out, where the explosion occurs makes a difference, and I think the expert I was citing was talking about a sci-fi film set in deep space, not LEO.
The other point is that we don’t know the frame rate for the clips of the explosions in your linked video. Film of nuclear explosions is often captured at very high frame rates for obvious reasons, so what looks like several seconds could very well only be a fraction of a second in real time.
ETA: Found the clip:
Small clarification here - it’s soft X-rays as secondary emission from the extreme heating of the bomb materials, and some amount of gamma rays from the actual nuclear fission reaction.
Starfish Prime wasn’t a space detonation, in atmospheric terms. It detonated at an altitude of 250 miles above earth. It’s true that for navigational purposes this is commonly called “space”, and it’s above the Kármán line. However in the atmospheric sense, this detonation happened in the thermosphere, the second-highest layer of Earth’s atmosphere (below the exosphere, above the mesophere).
The thermosphere is of course very thin, but it’s not a vacuum. There’s still quite enough atmosphere to interact with a nuclear blast, which is partially why you see the halo and other effects documented in the video (also as LSLGuy mentions, Earth’s magnetic field created some interesting aurora-like interactions). These effects can only occur in atmosphere, not in the vacuum that describes most of outer space.
What about neutron bombs? Weren’t some designed to take out ICBMs precisely because blast effects didn’t work at high altitudes? So wouldn’t the same radiation effects be more effective than conventional nukes in space proper.
Upthread I mentioned that nukes in space need to be detonated on or inside the target. However when the target itself is a nuclear bomb that uses fission, then the distance can be relaxed to about 100 meters if a neutron bomb is used. In this case, the neutron flux from the exploding ABM causes partial fission of the ICBM warhead, which prevents it from yielding as designed. (I’m not clear whether this disrupts the yield partially or entirely).
But the important point there is it still needs to be within 100m or so of the target, and this case only works because of the very specific interactions between the ABM neutron warhead and the ICBM missile warhead. This approach wouldn’t work for blowing holes in the Death Star.
Not even if you dropped the warhead down a thermal exhaust port?
Hard to comment on Star Wars physics without knowing what they are. I’m thinking a standard US Army W70M3 would leave the Death Star almost entirely reusable, exactly like what was supposed to happen to West German cities in the cold war.
The neutron flux would entirely poison the reactor fuel. The 1kt blast is not a small thing, it would definitely obliterate ~1 mile of the center, but the Death Star was a massive structure supposedly 99 miles in diameter. Whatever they used in canon must have been a lot more powerful than anything we can imagine. Even the Tsar Bomba (~50 mT depending who you ask) only had a 5 mile fireball.
FWIW, one anti-ballistic missile system design (LIM-49A Spartan) used a gold-enhanced tamper nuclear warhead to generate more x-rays, presumably because of their effects on the electronics of inbound enemy nuclear warheads.
Right, since the firing mechanism contains small electronics with transistors and fine wiring, these metallic materials would absorb the X-rays, heating them up enough to cause thermal damage that disabled the triggering and mechanisms.
This is one case that a specially designed weapon can cause militarily useful effects at a workable distance (said to be 10 miles or so in this case). Again, not blast related, but due to a specific type of radiation targeting specific mechanisms of specific weapons systems.
On the topic of thermal X-ray damage, there was another theorized attack called “X-Ray pindown” with the same mechanism of damage, but the delivery would be ICBMs fired at a low trajectory and detonated continuously in the atmospheric flight path of boosting enemy ICBMs. Nuclear suppressive fire, if you will. I think ultimately this was deemed only useful in a first strike scenario, and too complex of a fire plan to pull off in reality, and hence too risky to be of any strategic value.
For what it’s worth, the first depiction of a nuclear explosion in space in a science fiction film that I’m aware of is in *Silent Running (1972), and is spherically symmetric, just like the ones filmed in Operation Starfish a decade earlier. (about 2 minutes in)
Of course, the full-planet explosions of Altair 4 in Forbidden Planet and of Metaluna in This Island Earth were spherical, too. So was the original explosion of Alderaan in Star Wars when it first came out. But that whole “Praxis effect” ring explosion just looks cooler, and in the movies, Cool Rules.
For that matter, Mars exploding is pretty spherical in the old Topps “Mars Attacks” cards
I’m not a true Star Wars geek so someone more learned in the cannon will may come in to correct me, but I think its pretty clear that the majority of the explosion that destroyed the Deathstar was caused by the interaction between the proton torpedo and power core the the Deathstar itself. The proton torpedo’s themselves were not that big a deal as could be seen when one of the pilots missed the exhaust port. There was a bit of a shake up inside the deathstar but no serious damage.
In looking into this I found this geeky video about the unique characteristic of Protons that retcons why they might be suited to a precise strike on the deathstar, as opposed to just being a blatant knock off by Lucus of Star Trek’s photon torpedoes.