Gorath
- ️Sun Jul 14 2024
|
| ||
| ||
| ||
- This page is about the fictional celestial body. For the film of the same name, see Gorath (film).
Gorath (ゴラス Gorasu) is a runaway celestial body that first appeared in the 1962 Toho film Gorath and later made an appearance in the film Godzilla Final Wars in 2004. It also appears in GODZILLA: Project Mechagodzilla, the second official prequel novel to the GODZILLA anime trilogy.
In its debut film, Gorath was a black dwarf star on a collision course with Earth. Over the course of several years, humanity's greatest scientific minds collaborated to develop a method of avoiding the impending calamity, and after great difficulty succeeded in moving the planet out of Gorath's path as it passed through the solar system. In Godzilla Final Wars, the Xiliens projected a hologram of a planet-sized Gorath as a ruse to gain humanity's trust, pretending that they intended to prevent it from impacting Earth while gradually infiltrating positions of power in the Earth Defense Force. Once the aliens' ploy was exposed and Godzilla fought his way through their monster pawns, the Controller of Planet X summoned the real, much smaller Gorath to Earth. The meteorite[2] was merely a vessel for the Xiliens' ultimate weapon: Monster X. In GODZILLA: Project Mechagodzilla, Gorath was a massive asteroid set to impact and destroy Earth while humanity was in the midst of a war with kaiju. Battra sensed Gorath's approach and awoke to stop it, but Godzilla fought and killed him before destroying it himself.
History
- Gorath (1962)
- Godzilla Final Wars (2004)
Showa era
Gorath
In September 1976, the Palomar Observatory noticed the presence of a black dwarf star entering the solar system. This star was promptly designated as Gorath, and a crew of scientists surveying Saturn aboard the Japanese JX-1 Hayabusa spacecraft was dispatched to investigate it. Computational results equated the mass of Gorath as 6,000 times the Earth's, but the Hayabusa's crew failed to account for Gorath's relatively small size, roughly half that of Earth. In addition to inward celestial damage of the solar system, it was realized that Gorath's trajectory placed it on a fatal collision course with Earth. Unable to escape the force of Gorath's gravity, the crew of the Hayabusa relayed the last details of Gorath to Earth before being killed upon collision with the star's surface. Upon their death, a United Nations task force was formed to figure out how to deflect Gorath or move the Earth out of its path. In 1979, the sister craft of the Hayabusa, the JX-2 Otori, was sent to observe Gorath at close range, with the ultimate purpose of destroying or deflecting it with nuclear weapons. However, observation of the star's growing mass fueled by the absorption of other celestial material proved such an endeavor to be futile. The Otori's crew later observed Gorath's absorption of the rings of Saturn on its approach to the inner planets. On Gorath's closest approach to Earth in February 1982, it absorbed the Earth's moon, but the U.N. South Pole Operation at Antarctica successfully displaced the orbit of the Earth out of the star's path using fields of heavy hydrogen-powered jets. Leaving in its aftermath a devastated, but at long last united humanity, Gorath exited the solar system back into deep space.
Millennium era
Godzilla Final Wars
After the Xiliens revealed themselves to the people of Earth and teleported away the monsters attacking the planet's major cities, the Xilien Commander explained that his race had come to save mankind from an impending disaster. He revealed that a gigantic runaway planet called Gorath was on a collision course with the Earth and would arrive and destroy it very soon, and that the Xiliens wanted to prevent this disaster from happening. However, Miyuki Otonashi and some of the Earth Defense Force's members concluded that Gorath was merely a hologram, and that the Xiliens had more sinister intentions. The Commander was usurped and murdered by his protege, who became known as the Controller of Planet X, soon afterwards.
After the Xiliens' plan was exposed and the remaining members of the EDF boarded the Xilien Mothership, the Controller released his trump card against Godzilla. The Controller summoned the real Gorath meteorite[2] to Tokyo, but Godzilla managed to destroy it with his atomic breath, creating a massive explosion that destroyed a large area of the city. However, Gorath was merely a vessel for transporting the Xiliens' ultimate weapon, the creature known as Monster X, who descended to the ground and challenged Godzilla.
Video games
- CR Godzilla: Descent of the Destruction God (2010) - pachinko
Books
GODZILLA: Project Mechagodzilla
Gorath was discovered by Japanese amateur astronomers in 2038. It was an asteroid with a diameter of about 30 kilometers, and a mass comparable to the Moon, and its constituent substances were never fully known. In 2040, Japanese astronomer Dr. Tajiri realized that Gorath was going to collide with the Earth in 2042, and noted that Gorath seemed to have a will of its own, following an abnormal path to put itself on a collision course with Earth. Because of this, Tajiri proposed that Gorath could have been a space monster. Because it was determined to be difficult to change Gorath's path, it was declared the greatest threat to humanity in 2041, and thus preparations to evacuate the planet and establish a base in outer space were begun. However, in 2042, Godzilla appeared in the Arctic for the first time in five years and fired his atomic breath into space at the approaching Gorath, completely destroying it. It was later theorized that the reason Godzilla suddenly disappeared in 2037 was because he detected the approach of Gorath and went into hibernation to store enough energy to destroy it. The monster Battra also awoke earlier than his counterpart Mothra in order to respond to the approach of Gorath, but was apparently killed in battle with Godzilla.[1]
Trivia
- Gorath appears in the 2015 Toho Kaiju expansion for Bandai's trading card game Battle Spirits. Like in Godzilla Final Wars, it has a direct connection to Monster X and Keizer Ghidorah. When deployed, it allows a player to add any card with those names to their hand if it is among the bottom five cards in their deck.[3]
- Gorath is referenced in the 1997 television series Godzilla Island through the name of Mt. Gorath (ゴラス火山 Gorasu Kazan, lit. "Gorath Volcano").
- Gorath's role in GODZILLA: Project Mechagodzilla is a reference to the film Godzilla vs. Mothra, where it is revealed Battra was destined to stop an asteroid from colliding with and destroying the Earth. The novel also states that Gorath was hypothesized to be a space monster, referencing its role as Monster X's vessel in Godzilla Final Wars.
Notes
- ↑ Gorath's diameter is said to be 3/4 that of Earth. Earth's polar diameter is estimated at 12,713.6 kilometers, while its equatorial diameter is 12,756 kilometers. Thus, Gorath's diameter may be estimated at somewhere between 9,535 and 9,567km.
- ↑ Gorath's mass is said to be 6,000 times that of the Earth. Earth's mass is typically defined as 5.97237×1024 kilograms. Thus, Gorath's mass may be estimated as 3.583422e+28, or >35.834 octillion, kg.
- ↑ In GODZILLA: Project Mechagodzilla, Gorath's mass is estimated to be roughly equivalent to that of the Moon. The Moon's mass is typically defined as 7.342×1022 kilograms, equal to 7.342e+22, or roughly 73.42 sextillion, kilograms.
References
This is a list of references for Gorath. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
|
Showing 23 comments. When commenting, please remain respectful of other users, stay on topic, and avoid role-playing and excessive punctuation. Comments which violate these guidelines may be removed by administrators.