Parsec

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"It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."

―Han Solo, referring to the Millennium Falcon^[src]

A parsec was a measurement of distance equal to approximately 3.26 light years.

[edit] Behind the scenes

By real world definition a parsec is 360×60×60/2π Astronomical Units (AU). It is a measurement of distance based on apparent stellar motion as observed from Earth.

Since the Galactic Standard "AU", would be based on Coruscant's orbit (368 days) it would equal 150,349,907,726 meters. This makes a Galactic Standard parsec equal 31,011,894,586,294,500 meters.

Note, that it is also possible that the Coruscant Day, Hour, etc. are 0.75% shorter than Earth's, in which case the AU and parsec would be the same length as Earth's.

Earth has a year 365.2424 days long and an AU of 149,597,870,691 meters. This makes an Earth based parsec equal 30,856,775,813,057,300 meters.

Planet	Orbit (days)	"AU" (meters)	parsec (meters)
Earth	365.2424	149,597,870,691	30,856,775,813,057,300
Coruscant	368	150,349,907,726	31,011,894,586,294,500

[edit] A New Hope Mess-up?

In Star Wars: A New Hope a boastful Han Solo claims that his spaceship made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. This is odd because he says parsec like it is a unit of time, but it really is a unit of distance.

The thing to keep in mind about Solo's claim of doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs is that the Kessel Run is through the Maw. Event Horizons around black holes are dependent on the speed at which you are travelling. A standard ship has to do the run in 18 parsecs because to cut the route any closer, the ship would get sucked in. The Falcon, however, is fast enough to straighten the route and cut over 6 parsecs off the distance travelled. This makes sense, since the Falcon's hyperdrive is often rated as a x.5 rather than a x1 standard, potentially making it twice as fast as standard ships. While this argument may all be after-the-fact justification for an actual scriptual error, the logic does hold.

On the other hand, a parsec is a very small unit in astronomical terms, only 3.26 light years. Elementary arithmetic shows that if the Galaxy is the same size as the Milky Way, roughly 30,000 parsecs across, any ship capable of travelling across the galaxy in only a few weeks would travel six parsecs in less than ten minutes-- hardly a significant difference. A similiar issue arises in The Courtship of Princess Leia, when it takes more than a week to travel a distance of only seventy parsecs (the stated distance between Dathomir and Coruscant.

[edit] No, No Hope

The event horizon of a black hole does not, as stated above, depend on the speed of a traveler, only on the mass of the black hole. If the event horizon were 18 pc from the black hole, the black hole would have to have a mass of (Solar masses), i.e. around a hundred thousand times more massive than the most massive black holes known, observationally or theoretically.