Gigaer asked me to comment on reports from roc.weiler and gigaer.prano on the recent invasion of Yulai, and his theory that the Sansha were trying to explode Yulai proper.
As a particle physicist, I don’t spend much time worrying about gravity. It’s been decade(s) since my classes on stellar mechanics. But I’ll take a shot. Let’s set the other issues (relativity, wormholes, warp drives) aside and discuss only one issue. If the Sansha had some mechanism to remove mass (“plasma extraction”) from the Yulai star, would that cause it to “blow up”?
I flew to Yulai and clicked “Show Info” on its star. It’s an F7, with a temp of 6.4k Kelvin and a radius of 0.73 solar radii. In other words, its a bit small for the main sequence but still solidly within the expected range, and in particular it is not a white dwarf. Its presence on the main sequence means the Yulai star’s mass is roughly 0.8 solar masses.
Here is the HR diagram (via Wikipedia/Richard Powell) showing the main sequence and other stages of stellar evolution:
Remember, when a star becomes a white dwarf, it sheds much of its mass, leaving a metal-rich core. If the remaining core accretes enough mass to become heavier than the Chandrasakahar limit of ~1.4 solar masses, the quantum-mechanical electron degeneracy pressure can’t hold up the star and it collapses with a supernova. But Yulai isn’t a white dwarf, it’s a main sequence star. If the original star is lighter than the Chankdrasekhar mass, the even-lighter remaining dwarf will be insufficiently massive as well. Taking yet more mass away with “plasma extraction” won’t help. Quickly removing a huge mass from its core will cause the star to collapse, but it is never going to beat electron degeneracy. Yulai is too light for it to ever supernova.
What the Sansha would need to do is somehow shut off fusion in the star, convert all of it to electron-degenerate matter, and then _add_ mass—-and a lot of it. More than 0.6 solar masses of it, another K or G star’s worth. Maybe if “plasma extraction” meant they were pulling it off another star through a wormhole, collapsing a white dwarf with the Yulai mass would be possible. But that is a tall order for known wormhole/stargate technology. For example, a titan has a mass between 2-3 billion kilograms. That is about 1 to 1.5 times 10^{-21} solar masses——-a billion trillion times lighter than the mass required to for Yulai to reach the Chandrasekhar limit! Either the Sansha have some insanely good wormhole technology, or they would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to transfer the mass required. And that doesn’t solve the problem of quickly converting the entire Yulai star into electron-degenerate matter. Maybe one could do that with some heretofore-undiscovered laws of physics, but as far as we know it is impossible.
My conclusion is that the Sansha weren’t making a serious attempt to collapse a star. So what were they up to?
I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases “success or failure in competitive activities.” This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like “objective considerations of contemporary phenomena” — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
