Where Is the Death Star from 'Star Wars' Located in Real Life?

From Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

If you think you can visit the Death Star IRL by getting a ticket to Anaheim for Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, you have another think coming. 

The Star Wars mythmakers label their calendar in the same way we append our years with anno Domini and before Christ. History a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away can be divided into before and after the Battle of Yavin, a.k.a. when the heroes downed the Death Star in the events of Episode IV: A New Hope. Whatever happens, it's either After the Battle of Yavin (ABY) or Before the Battle of Yavin (BBY).

The Galaxy's Edge park is themed around the year 35 ABY. So you can find the made-up planet of Batuu, mentioned in passing by L3-37 in the 2018 film Solo, but none planet destroyer there is. 

It's not unheard of for a noisy subset of us Star Wars fans to wade into cultish, intolerant territory, so don't be surprised if Death Star has been used to name everything from stadiums to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign. The AT&T logo was even called one, as was the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, formerly the Cowboys Stadium. 

Still, that was not enough make-believe, and a petition went around in 2012 asking the Barack Obama government to build a real Death Star. The White House got the joke, responding in jest to what everybody wanted to know: How much would it cost to build a Death Star? 

It's $850,000,000,000,000,000. Or so answered the White House Office of Management and Budget in 2013. But seriously, is a Death Star possible? 

Scientists say yes—if we have a mining industry on asteroids in the first place. 

When all else fails, there's always Lego. Since we're infantile at best on the Kardashev scale, we can't do anything for now but imagine what Type II civilizations must be doing out there with weapons of celestial destruction. 

Our clues lie in the twinkling of stars. There's a distant star known as KIC 8462852, a.k.a. Tabby's Star, that has our scientists getting very suspicious. Apparently, it brightens immediately after it dims, and at regular intervals at that.

Some scientists have explained away such phenomenon as the handiwork of a planet-like energy harvester called a Dyson sphere.

First theorized in the 1930s, a Dyson sphere is a megastructure that can completely engulf a star, harvest its power, and satisfy an entire species' power needs. Think of it as the Death Star to the Stars.

KIC 8462852 has been known to act pretty weird, its light curve dwindling by a miniscule percentage over a day before reverting to normal brightness. The star in question is 1,280 light years away from earth, so we may never confirm in this lifetime if a star-eater is at work.

Closer to our neighborhood, there's a massive object that could really pass for a real-life Death Star. Just two years before Episode VI screened in theaters, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Saturn and took a few snaps of its moons. One of them, Mimas, looks like this. 

The closest snap of Saturn's satellite Mimas (above) ever was taken by the Cassini Orbiter before Valentine's Day 2010. Note how Mimas' trademark Herschel crater echoes the Death Star's (below) superlaser focus lens