Timeline for How do you non-catastrophically reduce the mass of the Sun by half?
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18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 3, 2018 at 1:18 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 22:09 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @JustinThyme Yes, that was exactly what I was saying: You would see the other side. And you would see the lensing. From all directions. The direction from which you look at it dictates the direction of the perspective that you see at its center (on the other side). Just try to draw straight lines of light through your paper wormhole and be enlightened :-) | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 22:06 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | I look at it more from a hard science perspective. But gravity is exactly where you have the choice: Gravity dictates the curvature of space, not which parts of space can be connected. I don't know whether general relativity provides any restraints on the difference of gravitational potential between the two ends. Afaik, you can either choose to say that the roundtrip through the wormhole and back through normal space will never create energy, or you can drop that requirement. If you drop it, you get your fun with space cannons and such, otherwise the use of wormholes is rather restricted. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 22:00 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | @cmaster We are probably going to get bounced to chat, but what would one see if one could look through a wormhole? The other side? Would light 'lens' through it if there were a large gravitational source at one or either end? And thus, what would one see if they were behind a wormhole, looking towards it? | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 21:57 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @JustinThyme How much space is within the wormhole depends on the wormhole. But I guess any real world wormhole would look like this: It's a spherical region (spherical for simplicity) that, no matter from which direction you look at it looks like a ring that heavily distorts the image of what is behind and around that region. But when you look right at the center of the wormhole, you just see the universe from the perspective of the other end of the wormhole. The larger the wormhole, the less space seems to bend, even though it will be heavily bent by our standards. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 21:55 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | @cmaster That is certainly one acceptable concept of a wormhole, but by no means the only concept explored in sci fi. That is, it posits that normal space/time is continuous through the wormhole. In such a situation, then, the question would become 'What would the gravity well look like around a wormhole?' Would it fan out, be centered just around the hole, like a 'projection' sticking out, would it be like a laser beam or a point light source. if we use light propagation as an analogy? | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 21:49 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | They will see a large flat, euclidian space. But in two areas, weird things happen. A straight ray of light that touches the border is just slightly deflected. If it hits a bit more of the region, it bends around like hell. But a ray of light that hits that region proper will not come out behind that region, instead, it will come out of the other region. I.e. when they look at one of the regions, they see the outside of the other region within its center. And if you go down towards the middle of that region, just seem to pass through almost flat space, but will reemerge from the other region. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 21:41 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @JustinThyme I understand wormholes to be similar to this: Take a sheet of paper and cut two circular holes of the same size into it which are far away from each other. Now take a strip of paper and glue it around the rim of one hole so that it stands up like a cylinder. Bend the sheet of paper around so that the second hole meets the top of the cylinder, and glue it to the cylinder as well. Now think that the cylinder has actually a smooth transition to both sides and try to imagine what 2D people living in the sheet of paper will see. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 13:50 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | @cmaster My point was, it begs the question be asked, 'what is inside a worm hole?' Is there a 'threshold barrier'? Does a worn hole require energy to be expended while traversing it? Is travel from one side to the other instantaneous, or do you spend any time in it? And exactly what IS 'time' in a worm hole? Lots of things to be had waved away. | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 6:16 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @JustinThyme It's the same thing as with placing one end of the worm hole at the bottom of the ocean, and the other end on the Sahara. worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/79797/37815 It's not about sucking the stuff in, it's about the pressure difference between the two sides of the wormhole/portal. And about the effective cross section area of the worm hole. The wider the wormhole, the more effective your space cannon... | |
| Oct 2, 2018 at 1:49 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | @cmaster That might be the basis for a really, really neet space cannon-type weapon. But doesn't that assume the wormhole has 'negative pressure', whatever that is, to suck things in? Or maybe this is a can of worms I do not want to open up. | |
| Oct 1, 2018 at 8:06 | comment | added | Alice | @cmaster Hmm, you are right, my bad, didn't consider that. | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 20:59 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @Alice Whether there will be a second star forming at the other end of the wormhole depends on whether you allow gravity to propagate through the wormhole. With gravity, the effect is that you'll only have a single sun with two distinct surfaces. Without gravity, the plasma will shoot out of the wormhole with a speed corresponding to the pressure on the other side (about 250,000,000 bar just outside the sun's core). And you won't have a mass on the other side to hold the plasma back. It will just disperse quickly into space. | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 16:06 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | Believe me, I am not ignoring you or your idea. I have picked up on it in another answer, but you deserve full credit for the original concept. | |
| Sep 28, 2018 at 9:29 | comment | added | Alice | And if the other end of the wormhole is stationary, then the matter flow will create a second half-Sun, and halt when the equilibrium is reached at each half-Sun being half the mass of the original Sun, exactly as needed. | |
| Sep 26, 2018 at 17:06 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | However, that is not to say that others seeking an answer to this question might not find your answer regarding human intervention and 'accident' suitable for their needs. | |
| Sep 26, 2018 at 17:04 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | A novel plausible approach. I will allow that the wormhole could have resulted from alien intervention and manipulation, so long as it was not specifically directed at our Solar System. That is, any effects on our Solar System were unintended consequences of alien activity at a distance. It is my desire to keep any intelligent action completely external to the Solar System and completely unintentional. For instance, aliens wanted to 'starlift' material from our Sun for their own purposes, in an environmentally friendly non-destructive way, that left no presence behind, like through a wormhole. | |
| Sep 26, 2018 at 16:45 | history | answered | Skek Tek | CC BY-SA 4.0 |