Science Fiction or Fact: Star-Destroying Superweapon
A superweapon blows a star to kingdom come, frying nearby planets. CREDIT: NASA.
Adam Hadhazy, Life's Little Mysteries Contributor Date: 01 September 2012 Time: 10:56 AM ET
In this occasional series, Life's Little Mysteries explores the plausibility of popular science fiction concepts.
In science fiction, planet-busting superweapons are all the craze. Yet even more terrifying than the ability to destroy a planet is the wherewithal to take out an entire star. The sun Crusher in the "Star Wars" Jedi Academy novel trilogy serves as an example of such a godlike device.
Overall, solar annihilators are rare compared to plain ol' world-enders, indeed scaling with the inherent difficultly of star-killing, at least from a modern physics and technology standpoint. [Planet-Destroying Superweapon [ http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2830-planet-destroying-superweapon.html ]]
The dastardly deed is theoretically possible, however, and even on time scales not stretching into millions of years. "There's one scheme to me that seems not quite plausible, but it's close," said Mike Zarnstorff, an experimental plasma physicist and deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Read on to find out how future Dr. Evils might hold a whole solar system for ransom.
Tough star stuff
Destroying a star poses two major problems. For one, the kinds of stars that would typically host habitable planets are colossal, both size- and mass-wise. Our sun, for instance, spans 865,000 miles in diameter, can store about a million Earths in its interior and sports a mass of approximately two octillion metric tons. (That's a two followed by 27 zeroes.)
The composition of a star [ http://www.space.com/57-stars-formation-classification-and-constellations.html ] is a related issue. Stars are simple spheres of superheated gas, or plasma, roiling about in balance (for most of their long lives) between gravitational collapse and the buoyancy of energy-releasing fusion reactions. Stars, in effect, are made to chug along, and in our sun's case for more than 10 billion years.
"Stars are really big and have a lot of inertia," or resistance to a change in their state, "and that inclines them to keep doing what they're doing," said Zarnstorff.
Given stars' size, temperature and composition, traditional armaments such as metal-encased thermonuclear bombs would not phase them in the slightest. [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth [ http://www.livescience.com/17875-destroy-earth-doomsday.html ]]
Fusion gone sour
Could a star's self-powering fusion reactions somehow be "poisoned?" Zarnstorff does not see a plausible means of doing so.
Stellar fusion involves the smashing together of hydrogen atoms into deuterium and tritium (hydrogen's two isotopes), then on into helium, lithium, and so on down the periodic table. Only the most massive stars, however, which have the hottest, densest cores can fuse all the way to iron. (These relatively short-lived stars provide poor environments for life to develop on hosted planets.)
The fusing of iron nuclei, however, requires more energy than the reaction unleashes. The metal, along with nickel, piles up, progressively robbing a giant star of the energy needed to prevent it from collapsing in on itself. The star eventually does just that, exploding into a Type II supernova.
Scrambling a star like our sun into blowing up, shutting down or changing its reaction rate (and thus size and temperature) is conceivable. But good luck finding enough material to knock the sun off-kilter.
Another conceivable method to slay a star would be to evaporate it, essentially. Stars constantly emit heat, light and particles into space, with the latter known as the solar wind. The mass loss from the solar wind is negligible. Increase the wind to a gale, though, and the star would diminish.
Stars vary wildly in their solar wind outflows, Zarnstorff noted. Further study of the mechanics behind faster flows could show how calm stars might grow gusty.
Perhaps bolstering the production of sunspots, along with their associated bursts of particles in flares and so-called coronal mass ejections, would move things along. "You can imagine changing the dynamics of the solar surface to promote sunspots," Zarnstorff said.
Instead of trying to overcome the size and mass of a star, a heinous sci-fi supervillain would be wise to work with these properties. Therein lies the least implausible means of destroying a star and within a reasonable length of time: using a black hole as a sort of implosion bomb.
A black hole [ http://www.space.com/15421-black-holes-facts-formation-discovery-sdcmp.html ] launched into the sun would "feed and grow exponentially," Zarnstorff told Life's Little Mysteries, and therefore would "self-propel" a star towards its doom. "A black hole could suck in all the mass of the sun," Zarnstorff said.
Not just any black hole would suffice, however, unless the hole could somehow be created within the sun itself. The catch is, black holes theoretically evaporate due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation (named for famed physicist Stephen Hawking [ http://www.space.com/15923-stephen-hawking.html ]).
An incredibly tiny black hole with the mass of a car, say, would survive for perhaps a billionth of a second; hardly long enough to traverse the distance from an origin point to the sun. Zarnstorff thinks a black hole more toward the mass of the Moon – though still merely a millimeter in "size" – might do the trick.
Even so, the creation of a diabolically useful-sized black hole is still far beyond our capabilities; it's possible that micro black holes could be produced in the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, but these would vanish within billionths of a billionth of a second.
Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not Foamy
Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that the space-time around Earth would be not only warped but also twisted by the planet's rotation. Gravity Probe B showed this to be correct. CREDIT: NASA
by SPACE.com Staff Date: 10 January 2013 Time: 10:00 AM ET
Space-time is smooth rather than foamy, a new study suggests, scoring a possible victory for Einstein over some quantum theorists who came after him.
In his general theory of relativity [ http://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html ], Einstein described space-time as fundamentally smooth, warping only under the strain of energy and matter. Some quantum-theory interpretations disagree, however, viewing space-time as being composed of a froth of minute particles that constantly pop into and out of existence.
A team of researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope [ http://www.space.com/18837-nasa-gamma-ray-telescope-improves-detection-of-thunderstorm-bursts-video.html ] in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart.
Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier "bubbles" in the quantum theorists' proposed space-time foam.
If this foam indeed exists, the three protons should have been knocked around a bit during their epic voyage. In such a scenario, the chances of all three reaching the Fermi telescope at virtually the same time are very low, researchers said.
So the new study is a strike against the foam's existence as currently imagined, though not a death blow.
"If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved," study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. (The Planck length is an almost inconceivably short distance, about one trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.)
"There is a possibility of a statistical fluke, or that space-time foam interacts with light differently than we imagined," added Nemiroff, who presented the results Wednesday (Jan. 9) at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.
If the study holds up, the implications are big, researchers said.
"If future gamma-ray bursts confirm this, we will have learned something very fundamental about our universe," Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University said in statement.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
