Check out How Enormous The Star Wars Galaxy Is
By Ani Bundel
We all know the Star Wars galaxy is big. But did you know just *how* big? Turns out it’s a lot larger than we thought.
How big is the Star Wars galaxy? Other than being big enough that it can be light years huge and yet far away from us that we never see it? Fans have wondered that for ages. Now a couple of scientists have sat down and run the numbers through simulations, and reported back their findings.
Turns out the Galaxy is Big. As a wise man once said: Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to this.
Directed by the fantastically named Professor Vandergheynst, the study was run by Signal Processing Laboratory 2 at the mouthful named Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. They’ve broken down the galaxy by species, by character connection and by distribution of characters across the eras. Check out the results below.
How they got this data:
To extract those infos I have built a web scraper (a robot) designed to extract data from every character of Wookiepedia. All the data is stored on the fly in a graph database. However, there is no common index to reach every character page on the site. To be sure that I was actually scrapping all the characters, I had to first fetch all the categories indexing the characters such as: Category:Individuals. From this root category, I created a network (a forest to be precise) of all subcategories under this root. Then for each category, a node in the category network, the robot fetches all the associated unique characters.
Of course, the most connected characters are the ones in the movies, which make’s Revan’s appearance on this list even more of an outlier than it might have been otherwise. The blog makes sure to let everyone know who he is:
He is very famous character from the Old Republic Era. Quoting Wookiepedia: Revan … was a Human male who played pivotal roles as both Jedi and Sith in the Mandalorian Wars and the Jedi Civil War.
For those who don’t know, the Star Wars timeline spans over 36,000 years. As the post notes: The extra colors highlight characters living on different eras. For instance Darth Vader both lives on the Rise of the Empire and on the Rebellion era (here in green).
Check out more of their work at the blog of the scientist who did all this number crunching: KirellBenzi.com