Welcome, Guest

Author Topic: Reviving a star (Challenge)  (Read 3526 times)

vh

  • formerly mudkipz
  • *****
  • Posts: 1140
  • "giving heat meaning"
Reviving a star (Challenge)
« on: September 07, 2011, 12:28:40 PM »
Earth, Population: 0?
The year is 3043 and the fusion at the core of the sun is mysteriously starting to fail, Every day, precise instruments on earth detect the slow but inevitable cooling of the sun. Scientists speculate that a Q-Ball, a mysterious dark object, has been eating away at the suns fuel source. It has stopped, but the sun is out of both hydrogen and helium, destined to self-destruct. Unless humans can stop the sun's explosion, or survive the destruction, everyone will go extinct.
With only several millenia until survival under these conditions will be impossible, and less than an eon until the sun is goes supernova, design a plan to save the world. *insert dramatic music here*



Anyway, the challenge is to come up with a feasible way to save the earth from the sun. Try to have solutions that are as practical as possible and as use a reasonable amount of resources. Original ideas? instead of stuff of off google would be nice.

"Theoretical physicists have suggested that one possibility is that super-symmetric particles could clump together into giant balls known as Q-balls. These heavy and exotic theoretical objects could have been made billionths of a second after our Universe began, and still be roaming the Universe today.

Brian Cox, a physicist at Europe's CERN, home of the LHC and consultant to Sunshine has speculated that, if a Q-ball drifts into the heart of a super-dense object such as a neutron star or our Sun, it could begin to eat away at it's core like a cancer, until the star is no longer massive enough to maintain itself and explodes in a violent explosion. Such explosions, known as gamma ray bursts, are seen in the Universe, although their cause is as yet unknown.

Each Q-ball is like a new universe "in a nutshell." Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an awesome cosmic explosion.

Finding Q-ball footprints would resolve a host of cosmic mysteries, including the nature of much of the dark matter that astronomers are convinced pervades the Universe, and perhaps the origin of the brilliant but unpredictable gamma-ray bursts.

If heavy Q-balls did form in the early Universe, they would still be around today. In that case, they could make up at least some of the unidentified dark matter that loiters around galaxies all over the Universe. We know this dark matter is there because its gravity distorts the paths of visible stars and galaxies.

Could such a dangerous, exotic object drift into the Sun's core and cause it to stop shining?

That is the premise of Danny Boyle's new science-fiction thriller, Sunshine, opening in the U.S. this month. It is likely that the Sun is many times too diffuse to stop a Q-ball - it would power right through. But is always remote possibility that some strange exotic form of matter from the earliest times in the universe could settle deep within the Sun's core, and disrupt its function enough to cause the catastrophic scenario seen in Sunshine."

so this could happen? i did change it slightly though
« Last Edit: September 07, 2011, 12:37:41 PM by mudkipz »