Tungsten Sun

[Tom Kalbfus]

Interesting property of the element Tunsten:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten
Melting point
3695 K ​(3422 °C, ​6192 °F)
Boiling point
6203 K ​(5930 °C, ​10,706 °F)

Sun

Star

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, with internal convective motion that generates a magnetic field via a dynamo process. It is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Ea…
Wikipedia
Radius: 432,376 miles (695,842 km)
Surface temperature: 5,778 K
Orbital speed: 139.81 miles/s (225 km/s)
Apparent magnitude: -26.74
Escape velocity: 2,026,575 feet/s (617,700 m/s)
Absolute magnitude: 4.83

Do you notice something? The boiling point of the metal Tungsten is higher than the surface temperature of the Sun! Now you may recall from science class, is that one of the properties of a liquid is that it holds a constant volume. Imagine a ball of liquid metal in space, in this case its molten tungsten kept at a temperature of 5,778 K, the same temperature as the surface of the Sun, and it does not boil, it does not evaporate and disperse into space, instead it si a glowing incandescent ball of liquid metal, when you look at it, it looks just like the Sun. Of course there is no fusion going on at its center, the ball will eventure cool, and solidify unless it is kept heated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten

This property of it retaining a liquid state at the temperature of the surface of the Sun, means it could be used as an artificial sun for something like a rogue planet, or a space station. Heating can be produced externally, with lasers, impact fusion, antimatter, or internally with micro black holes, or theoretical substances such as magmatter which destabilize normal matter and convert little bits of it to energy.

 

[wbnc]

it'd be easier to compress and trigger fusion in a handy brown dwarf. Now tungsten, with a lattice of carbon nanotubes would be great for building the framework for the device that generates the gravity field to generate the gravity well that would require.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

it'd be easier to compress and trigger fusion in a handy brown dwarf. Now tungsten, with a lattice of carbon nanotubes would be great for building the framework for the device that generates the gravity field to generate the gravity well that would require.

An artificial sun for an Earth sized planet would be about 400 kilometers in diameter, I don't think brown dwarfs come that small. The reason why I bring this us is that liquids form spheres in zero gravity.

You see this glob of water in the ISS? This is what molten Tungsten would do in space, it would form a sphere, and it would maintain a constant volume with a given amount of liquid, and it doesn't need gravity to hold itself together, that is why its important that tungsten remains a liquid at the surface temperature of the Sun, because if it was as hot as the Sun it would glow with the same color and brightness as the Sun. Now if you orbit one of these things, which at 400 km diameter would have 1/100th the mass of Earth's Moon, from the surface of the planet it orbits, it would look just like the Sun, it would be a pale yellow disk that is too bright to stare at directly for too long, if you basked under is rays, you could get a sunburn, the only difference is that while a real sun is self-sustaining, a tungsten sun would not be, it would redden and cool over time unless it has actively heated. If it was a ball of gas it would expand and dissipate, so you can't make a sun out of a ball of gas unless it was massive enough to be held together with gravity, but a liquid metal would suit this perfectly.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

An ideal blackbody of 400 km diameter at 5778 K would radiate:

Power = 5,67×10⁻⁸ W m⁻² K⁻⁴ × ( 4π200000² ) × 5778⁴ ≈ 32 × 10¹⁸ W or about 3 trillion Power (HG).

No-one in the OTU (apart from the Ancients) has the capacity to generate even a fraction of that kind of power.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

An ideal blackbody of 400 km diameter at 5778 K would radiate:

Power = 5,67×10⁻⁸ W m⁻² K⁻⁴ × ( 4π200000² ) × 5778⁴ ≈ 32 × 10¹⁸ W or about 3 trillion Power (HG).

No-one in the OTU (apart from the Ancients) has the capacity to generate even a fraction of that kind of power.

The Sun generates more than enough power for this, if has to illuminate half a planet after all.

Here is the basic plan for my artificial World, it comes in the shape of a hollow cylinder 12,800 km in diameter and 24,180 km long, it rotates once every 90 minutes to produce 1-g of centrifugal force. The Tungsten Sun is drawn to scale I the center, it is 200 km in diameter. Overall the mass of the Sun is about 1/800th that of Earth's Moon. A smaller cylinder, not shown in this diagram could be pulled around this sun each night, it reheats the sun with microwaves for the next day, and then retracts so the sun can shine once more. Probably this is beyond the capabilities of the Third Imperium.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Yes, all of this is far, far beyond the capabilities of the 3I.

You do as you wish in you campaign, of course, but it is far from possible in the OTU.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Yes, all of this is far, far beyond the capabilities of the 3I.

You do as you wish in you campaign, of course, but it is far from possible in the OTU.

that's kind of funny, because the society that builds this would have a lot of difficulty building an FTL drive. There are no examples of anything we know about moving faster than the speed of light, but there are a lot of huge things.

 

[-Daniel-]

This would make for a fun adventure. The characters find this alien thing out in an "empty " hex. What do they do? Who do they tell? Fun for all. LOL

 

[AndrewW]

This would make for a fun adventure. The characters find this alien thing out in an "empty " hex. What do they do? Who do they tell? Fun for all. LOL

Tow it back to the space station (note you'll have to widen the jump gate as it is too big to fit through it).

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

It is an O'Neill Cylinder that has a diameter the same as the Earth, it also is a small ringworld, that is its Sun is artificial, it is made up of a white hot liquid metal about the temperature of the surface of the Sun. There is something at the core of this sun that is converting small amounts of matter into energy. I would say the best thing would be either a tiny black hole or magmatter. Magmatter is a theoretical substance, its atoms are made up of magnetic monopoles instead of electrons, protons, and neutrons or their antimatter counterparts. Monopoles are much more massive than their electric charge based counterparts, so they would sit in the center of this artificial sun. Normal atoms that get too close to this magmatter core get destabilized by their magnetic fields and are converted to energy as per E=mc^2. So if you get just enough of this magmatter, this artificial star will convert matter into energy at the same proportional rate as our Sun, it will glow a pale yellow jus like our Sun, except that its surface will be liquid white hot Tungsten instead of mostly hydrogen as our Sun is. The Cylinder I drew is about twice as long as it is wide, it has climatic zones as well, ranging from tropical to arctic towards the ends of the cylinder. this cylinder is open to space, there are walls which are 500 kilometers high which hold in the atmosphere, centrifugal force provided by the Cylinder's 90 minute rotation keeps the atmosphere pressed against the curved floor of the cylinder, while the 500 km high walls keep the atmosphere from spilling out the ends. Night would be provided by something which periodically gets between the artificial sun and the inner habitable surface of the cylinder. the entire cylinder is on the same time zone experiencing day for the entire cylinder and then night for the entire cylinder.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

Tungsten was used to build the Darrian Star Trigger.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

Tungsten was used to build the Darrian Star Trigger.

You would need a lot of tungsten to do that, and some how transport it to he star's core to displace most of the hydrogen and halt nuclear fusion, then the core would collapse and you would have a supernova, but getting the tungsten and enough of it to the star's core is a big if, as stars above a certain temperature do not convect, and simply dropping tungsten on the star's surface will not work. Perhaps I you were to use some fictional technology, such as the Jump Drive, and you get a massive load of Tungsten, attach a jump drive to it, and plot a jump to the center of a star with it, somehow overriding the jump limits, then the tungsten will appear in the star's core, it will collapse, and the star will go nova or supernova, depending on how massive the star is.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

There was second probe involved and meson communications messed up the system. I am not a physics or chemistry major, just reporting the story as read.

 

[wbnc]

Tungsten was used to build the Darrian Star Trigger.

You would need a lot of tungsten to do that, and some how transport it to he star's core to displace most of the hydrogen and halt nuclear fusion, then the core would collapse and you would have a supernova, but getting the tungsten and enough of it to the star's core is a big if, as stars above a certain temperature do not convect, and simply dropping tungsten on the star's surface will not work. Perhaps I you were to use some fictional technology, such as the Jump Drive, and you get a massive load of Tungsten, attach a jump drive to it, and plot a jump to the center of a star with it, somehow overriding the jump limits, then the tungsten will appear in the star's core, it will collapse, and the star will go nova or supernova, depending on how massive the star is.

You would need a truly massive body of matter to upset the balance of stellar core. it would be less problematic to simply jump that mass into the core of the target planet and watch massive seismic disruptions of apocalyptic proportions destroy any society on the planet in days.

for that matter simply using a jump bubble inside a stellar core would probably trigger something nasty without the total possible output of tungsten of the 3rd imperium being involved.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

There is something called a nuclear damper, does it stop fusion or just fission. I don't think stars would be so easy to detonate, the fusion core of the Sun would be larger than the planet Earth!, and some stars simply do not have enough mass, they have to be larger than 1.44 Solar masses, or else it would just collapse into a white dwarf.