Crunching the numbers on Celestia's power · 11:52pm Feb 16th, 2016
So, here I am, and there are all these crossovers and arguments and scenarios where Celestia gets, for the lack of a better word, completely owned.
So I wonder: How powerful is Celestia, actually?
We never really saw her fight, and aside from the fact that she can move Sun and Moon and is probably very skilled when it comes to magic in general, we don't know much to help put into perspective how powerful she is.
So I went and crunched some numbers.
Here's the idea:
Celestia can make the Moon, which would otherwise just sit in the sky, orbit(*) the planet once a day.
She doesn't have a cutie mark helping her do this, so it's just her raw power behind it.
So if we calculate the force you need to sustain that orbit(*), we get an idea of the kind of power Celestia can put out constantly.
Assuming the dimensions of our planet and moon, this means Celestia can easily exert a constant force of about 1.5*10²³ Newtons which is necessary to keep the Moon circling the planet once per day.
That kind of force can accelerate a metric ton of mass to relativistic speeds in nanoseconds.
The energy such a projectile would release upon impact makes thermonuclear explosives look like cap bombs in comparison.
Alternatively, if we assume that a unicorn's telekinetic field confers a pressure, not a force, (meaning the larger the object, the more force you can exert) Celestia's telekinesis can create a pressure of 150,000 atmospheres, or 15GPa.
That is more than enough to crush people into diamond. Or, given a run-up of a metre, launch coins fast enough to hit as hard as meteors.
Either way, those are the kind of things Celestia has the power to do all day, every day.
You better not cross her, I suppose.
Edit and Disclaimer:
(*)Orbit is here used in a colloquial way following its dictionary definition and not in a strict scientific way.
question: with this in the light, why does she seems so useless?
she lets Twilight and her friends do all of it. she lost against Chrysalis, i doubt she did it by accident then. this, i can understand. she KNOWS that if anything goes wrong, she can just kill everybody essentially so she has all the time in the world to let others safely discover their own abilities.
but the AU Celestia. there was no founding of the mane six. she was at war with Sombra and for some reason put her ponies to war and did very little fighting herself. this was not a time of "let others discover themselves," it's all-out WAR where ponies are DYING and losing limbs and such. i dont think if she had that power, she would let it slide.
this means the show people themselves are unaware of the abilities of their own creation. OR, our Earth and sun and moon are separate from the MLP's Earth and sun and moon
3759634
I have no idea. I just wanted to get an idea of what Celestia should be, given what we know she can do, capable of.
Though one common theory as to why she doesn't use it is that she has no middle ground–either she uses everyday unicorn magic, or she goes directly for spells of mass destruction.
Maybe she just doesn't have the fine control, maybe the principles of unicorn magic stop working with such extreme energies and if she uses her star moving power on anything smaller that a moon, it will explode, etc.
In that case, it may be entirely possible that Celestia, for example, used that kind of power in the past (launching a metorite-speed boulder or something) to defeat an enemy army, only to discover a lot of her ponies got caught in the blast as well, and decided to never use it again for any other purpose than raising sun and moon.
Basically the same reason why noone sane uses atomic bombs in our world: they are too destructive.
It takes zero force to sustain an orbit. That's part of the definition of orbit.
4010124
Technicalities. We're talking about the difference in attractive force between a geosynchronous orbit and one with an orbital period of one day, both assumed circular and with equal radius.
Or, you know, we could try and calculate what change in the energy-momentum tensor would result in the observed change of the geodesic the moon is travelling along/resting on. Except that's a bit complicated, doesn't have a unique solution and leaves either a lot more assumptions to be made to attain a solution.
Still, your nitpick was duly noted, and technically, you are correct in the sense that the magic-sustained closed path of Equestria's moon is not an orbit as we define it.