Isaac Arthur has a neat video series on 'Civilizations At The End Of Time'; the era of the universe where there is no more fusion, all the luminous stars have sputtered out, and civilizations scavenge energy from the various remaining sources. 'Iron Stars' (the iron-rich remains of stellar cores after they reach end-of-life) take trillions of years to cool off. I'm not too sure, but I think the nickle-iron cores of planets last a similarly long time.
There's no such animal. Once a star begins burning silicon into iron, it's only minutes away from going supernova. (Once it starts burning oxygen not silicon it's got five years, tops. Life comes at you pretty fast.)
Possibly not, or possibly there are. If scientifically possible then they could exist...
Only stars with more than eight solar masses go supernova (and then become either a neutron star or a black hole). Below that they become a white dwarf and cool off for trillions of years.
And the ones that don't go supernova don't produce iron.
It's not radioactive decay that's going on, it's radiative cooling. That happens at a rate proportional to the fourth power of the temperature, and I don't remember enough DiffEq to turn that into a closed form solution - I expect it would be something involving an exponential but not the plain
exp(-t) of radioactive decay.
Mmm, yes. If long half life transuranics exist, that'd be one place to look for them.
Indeed, you're right! I've learned something new today, thank you.
Like I said, always happy to be pedantic. Wanna know about the evolution of evidentials into ideophones in Middle !Kee? Lets you date documents in all but the high register to within ten years. Three years, sometimes.
