P2 7 What do stars do best? Shine!

Abstract

In the film ’Stardust’, the magical realm of Stormhold encounters a fallen star in the form a human woman. In the final encounter against the evil witch, she does what stars do and shines as bright as she can to destroy said witch.By modeling the ‘starlight’ as surface power density (surface irradiance) equivalent to the sun at 6.41×10^7Wm−2, we determined a radiation pressure acting on the witch to be 1.48×10^−3Pa at a distance of 3 m. For a radiation pressure strong enough to destroy human skin, we calculated a surface irradiance of 1.17×10^18Wm−2.