Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, cinema’s most famous hastily retconned twins, are actually around 1.75 years apart in age thanks to the relativistic nature of space travel according to a group of goddamned nerds from the U.K.’s University Of Leicester. A new paper, which appears in the Journal Of Physics Special Topics, explains how both velocity and gravitational time dilation achieve this effect in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. As it explains:
To examine relativistic time dilation we consider the separate journeys that both twins make to Cloud City. Leia travels from the neighbouring system of Anoat, while Luke travels from the much more distant planet Dagobah. Luke’s journey was ~7 days travel in his own reference frame, which was estimated to be 25 times longer than Leia’s, making her journey 0.28 days (6.72 hours) in her own reference frame. Additionally, as Leia travels in the Millennium Falcon, a much larger ship with more powerful engines than Luke’s X-Wing Starfighter, it was assumed that it reaches a higher velocity of 0.99999c compared to the 0.99995c achieved by the X-Wing.