Sunday, November 25, 2018

[vvhdmhjd] Portable supernova bomb

Astroengineering: find or build a white dwarf just slightly below Type Ia supernova mass threshold.  Tow the star to the target.  Feed it some more mass, setting off a supernova, destroying the target.

White dwarf stars, being small, are hopefully more convenient to move around than other types of stars which go supernova.  And hopefully easier to control and predict compared to the wild behavior of massive stars at the end of their main-sequence lives, e.g., Wolf-Rayet stars.

Even better than white dwarf would be black dwarf.  One can sneak the bomb in without it being detected.  Can a white dwarf be artificially cooled rapidly?  Attach radiator fins.

Possibly better than a white dwarf would be a neutron star, because, being much smaller, it would be even easier to conceal.  The device would be smaller than either Death Star.  However, what happens when a neutron star is fed enough mass to become a black hole?  This situation likely already happens in nature through accretion from a binary companion.  Is there an explosion accompanying the final gravitational collapse, or does it just go silently into the night?

We could arrange for two neutron stars to collide at the target, setting off a kilonova.

Actually, it could be that Wolf-Rayet (and similar) stars, being intensely luminous, are easier to move around (more portable) than the smaller ones: Shkadov thruster.  Seeing such a star headed straight toward you would be pretty terrifying, even without considering that it has been wired to supernova when it gets to you.

For extra big boom, build a star that will explode as a pair-instability supernova or gamma-ray burst/hypernova.

No comments :