How to save our sun from supernova
From Telkoth.net
The details of how to make this work are not entirely clear to me, but I do have some ideas inspired from my poor grasp on quantum physics and astronomy.
To understand the solution, however, we first must understand the problem:
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[edit] What a Star is Made Of
First, understand how a star is built: huge quantities of Hydrogen are all pulled toward the center of the star by gravity. Just as the pressure of Water increases as you go deeper into the ocean, the pressure of Hydrogen increases as you go toward the center of a star. The force of this pressure is so great at the core that it actually drives the Hydrogen atoms to fuse into Helium. This fusion in turn releases an amount of energy in the form radiation, photons and neutrinos. So incredible is the created energy that it actually manages to repel the force of gravity pulling things in.
So a star is precisely the size it is because the force of gravity is met with the radiating force of energy from the fusion, and as long as these things stay constant, everything is good.
[edit] What Makes a Star Supernova
The problem for a star comes when all the Hydrogen in the star's core is fused into Helium. The pressure is not great enough to fuse Helium, and so with no fusion taking place, the star begins to collapse - to shrink.
This collapse creates pressure, however, and eventually the force of the incoming mass produces enough pressure to fuse the Helium at the core, and a shell of Hydrogen surrounding it. The energy created from these two layers of fusing material is so great that the star expands.
We're now looking at a Red Giant.
This process of running-out, collapsing, and fusing continues through Carbon, Neon, Oxygen, Silicon... heavier and heavier elements, each being depleted at increasing rates. And I do mean increasing: while the initial Hydrogen core will take billions of years to fuse, the Silicon core could all fuse in a single day.
The outside of the star during all of this is going completely haywire, shirinking, becoming huge, blowing off tons of the Hydrogen at its surface, engulfing planets, and generally wreaking havoc on the local solar system.
If that weren't bad enough, a supernova is in the immediate future when the star discovers, to its dismay, that fusing Iron would actually take more energy than it would get out of the process. Everything will rush inward at a terrifying speed, bounce off the iron core, and explode so violently that all the heavier elements will be created. In fact, without supernova elements like Silver, Gold and Tin wouldn't exist (let alone many other very useful elements).
[edit] How to Prevent a Supernova
So, now we know a little about a star's structure, and what makes it die. How can we use this to prevent a supernova?
Here's my idea, and again, I'm not sure on the details of how to do all of these things.
[edit] Find a Nearby Star
The first step is to find another, nearby star. Alpha Centauri, at 4.2 light years, might be a good pick.
[edit] Steal Its Hydrogen
Assuming there's no life in that solar system (hopefully one of SETI's first targets was the Alpha Centauri system), we set up some kind of crazy device that will draw off Hydrogen from the star, and accelerate it toward our Sun. A little math will give you a trajectory that accounts for the motion of things through space - that's not a problem - and I'm not sure, but I doubt Alpha Centauri is on the same plane as our solar system, so you shouldn't have to worry about planets getting in the way.
Anyway, if there are any problems with Alpha Centauri, there are plenty of other stars to pick from, but for now let's assume that Alpha Centauri's conditions are ripe for Hydrogen-harvest.
If you're wondering where to get the energy to continuously power a massive particle accelerator, recall that we'll be placing this device in as close an orbit to Alpha Centauri as possible - solar power, if nothing else, should do the trick.
Exact numbers are unclear to me - I know that a particle accelerator accelerates particles to "near the speed of light", but astronomers and physicists are a tricky lot: "near the speed of light" could be 50% the speed of light. Even if it was only 10%, we could expect to get the Hydrogen from Alpha Centauri to our sun in about 42 years, which is pretty good time.
[edit] Getting Rid of Helium
Stealing Hydrogen from nearby stars is only half the problem, though. Our sun would still be collecting a mass of Helium on its ever-growing Helium core. This would likely not be a problem at first, but it would almost certainly become one.
I'm sure what we'd like to blast the Helium out of there, but how can we do that? The sun is obviously nothing you want to approach directly :) It seems to me that physicists may be able to immediately answer this question: but isn't there a way to target particles that heavier than other particles? That is: since Helium is twice the mass of Hydrogen, isn't there something we could do that would affect only the heavier element, while leaving the Hydrogen relatively untouched?
I don't know if it'd take some sort of massive magnetic rig, or simply firing particles at great speed toward the sun's core (which we may already be doing, really, with all that Hydrogen from Alpha Centauri). Whatever the method, all that matters is that the Helium leaves. It barely matters in what direction, so long as the Earth doesn't take the brunt of it :)
[edit] Other Considerations
Some problems come to mind, but hopefully by the time we're worried about our star exploding we'll have some solutions:
- How will we steal Hydrogen from off of Alpha Centauri and into our orbiting particle accelerator? Does Hydrogen freely leave the surface, or will it need to be brushed, sucked, or in some other way coaxed off?
- What effects will a thick beam of Hydrogen being blasted onto our sun have? (Perhaps it'd be better to blast the Hydrogen into a declining orbit around the sun, but we'll have to be sure that that orbit doesn't intersect with that of the Earth's)
- What effects will extracting Helium from the core of the sun have on it?
- Can we siphon enough Hydrogen from a star quickly enough to account for the amount being fused? If not, how many stars will we have to simultaneously siphon Hydrogen from? And can we get streams of incoming Hydrogen to play nicely with each other, and our solar system, when they get here?
