How Hot is the Surface of a Jedi Lightsaber Blade?

This is one of my favorite excerpts from the book Star Wars: The Jedi Path. It’s a question experts would ask themselves when trying to solve a problem, and I’ve found it really useful in the PM role as well. In fact, what I do to solve many problems is look for an extrinsic metric that tells me how the product is doing (I use something called the “magic number”). You can use other metrics such as word of mouth, search, user ratings or many others. 

How hot is the surface of a lightsaber blade? If you’ve ever wondered about it or if you’re a Star Wars fan I have good news. A new study was published and it answers this question. The study was published in the journal Applied Physics Letters by scientists at Brown University and Lehigh University. They studied an ancient sword recovered from Japan and found that it has the temperature of a lightsaber blade.

The mediaeval swords they tested were made out of Damascus steel, a strong and flexible type of steel. It’s unclear how exactly the ancient sword got its glow, but the scientists used X-ray diffraction technology to find that electrons quickly move through the blade when it’s heated up. Once cooled down, there’s little temperature variation in the blade.

How Hot is the Surface of a Jedi Lightsaber Blade? This question has been posed many times in various forums, and people have tried to answer it. Some argue that “the blade heats up slightly” when used as lightsaber lightsabers. Others say that at lower temperatures (5-7 degrees Celsius) the heat from the LED on the tip increases so rapidly, you’d expect an opening around 2mm (~2/3 inch) too big for any human hand to fit through without pushing their arm outwards hard enough.

How hot is a lightsaber blade? In the movie “Attack of the Clones”, Anakin uses his lightsaber to cut through Count Dooku’s ship and rescue his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan is later shown hanging outside the ship with his hand still holding on to the lightsaber. The question arises: how hot is the light from a lightsaber? A lightsaber produces glowing plasma, and plasma is known to be very hot.

Right now at the core of our Sun, temperatures reach more than 15 million degrees Celsius. But nothing can be hotter than the particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland where particles move so fast that their temperature reaches a staggering 7 trillion degrees Celsius. But let’s stick to our galaxy for a minute and talk about those star systems that are presumably hosting habitable planets like Earth (that means we can even breathe there).

So how hot is a lightsaber? It must be very hot, considering we’ve seen them cut through metals like steel and blast doors. It turns out that plasma torches are the closest things we have in this world to a lightsaber. A constricted plasma arc reaches temperatures between 8000°C and 25000°C (between 14432°F and 45032°F). Given the evidence in the Star Wars universe and our own, we can conclude that a lightsaber reaches at least 1800°C (3432°F) and could get as high as 21000°C (41532°F).

It turns out that there is no heat emitted from the plasma blade of a lightsaber. Can you imagine what it would be like to withstand an energy blast from a lightsaber? Knowing this, we can conclude that the plasma blade reaches a temperature of at least 1800°C, and could reach as high as 25000°C.

There’s no heat emitted by the plasma blade, but that still leaves the question of how hot the plasma is. To reach temperatures as hot as a blast door (around 1795°C or 3263°F), lightsabers must cut through all types of metal, so they must be at least 538°C (1000°F). However, we’ve seen lightsabers cut through blast doors, which are designed to withstand laser blasts at even greater temperatures than standard steel doors. 

I think it’s possible that a titanium or platinum alloy was used for these doors, which would increase their melting point to around 1795°C (3263°F). In our universe, we have the closest technology to a lightsaber in plasma welding torches. A constricted plasma arc reaches temperatures between 8000°C and 25000°C (between 14432°F and 45032°F). Given the evidence in Star Wars and our own universe, we can conclude that lightsabers reach a temperature of at least 1800°C, and can be higher than 25000°C.\

To learn more about lightsabers and discover a wide range of models and accessories, do not hesitate to visit https://www.das-lichtschwert.de/, the website for fans and enthusiasts of this fantastic universe