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An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation, complete with some really cool
by jcims 5y ago
An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation, complete with some really cool shots of the plasma.
It occurred to me a few years later that the helium atoms he snapped together will likely survive until they are swallowed up by a black hole or maybe have a front row seat to a supernova or gamma ray burst. So likely hundreds of billions if not trillions of years.
- justin66 5y agoIt'll be a bit of an anti-climax, compared to some of that stuff. Those helium atoms are likely to be fuel for our sun somewhere along the line when it's burning down and becoming a white dwarf. Our star isn't big enough to do the supernova thing.
- Jcowell 5y agoOff topic but in a sci fi hypothetical, would there be a way to make out sun bigger to go supernova ?
- justin66 5y agoI could be wrong but I don't believe there's enough mass in our solar system for it to be close. Solar systems do merge with one another, stars bring other stars into their orbit, etc. It would take something like that, I believe.
- ravi-delia 5y agoNot any way that wouldn't just let us move to a star that will go supernova, I don't think. I just looked up the mass of the solar system, and got the gut-punch answer of 1.0014 solar masses. Considering that it seems to take 8 or so times as much mass as the sun for a star to experience a supernova, we could trivially just move all the non-star mass in the solar system elsewhere for several fewer orders of magnitude of effort.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- javajosh 5y agoWell, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will be merging, so there's an infinitesimal chance of a stellar collision with our Sun. (The odds of any stellar collision are, ahem, astronomically low, but you asked)
- mLuby 5y agoThrowing out some undercooked ideas for supernova-ing a star, from possible to impossible: 1. Throw more mass into it, ideally 1+ stars under their own power via Shkavov thruster. 2. Compress it physically with mirrors and particle/photon beams (see inertial confinement fusion) 3. Compress it magnetically with incredulously powerful magnetic fields (see tokamak fusion). 4. Compress it gravitationally by putting a black hole in its center. 5. Make it more explodey by converting half of its mass into antimatter.
- jcims 5y agoReally? That's interesting. I guess for some reason I had never considered that the sun would be taking in fresh fuel from is atmosphere. That is a little less exciting, but only a little bit.
- tejtm 5y agomaybe think of it as "ash" the newly fused element is more massive than the ones it came from and sinks to the bottom (core) When enough "ash" is accumulated (and the star is still big enough) the previous ash begins fusing into some new heavier "ash" rinse and repeat until you get to iron "ash" but no further. the reason is; every fusion lighter than iron is exothermic two atoms fuse into something bigger than either, but smaller than both, plus releasing some energy (yay). when you get to fusing iron you need a ball about 20 miles in diameter and fusing does not give up energy, fusing iron needs to take energy from its environment. good thing it is not in the middle of a star big enough to grow a twenty mile ball of iron. and that kids is where supernova come from once iron fusion starts it all goes in moments collapsing the core and the star above where the core was "falls" into that space gravitationally propelled with enough speed that when it hits the opposite side (falling just as fast in the other direction) everything fuses into "whatever" that is about as exciting as it gets in this universe
- jcims 5y agoI do get that part, but I like your description. The thing that I was interested in is whether or not a helium atom in the Earth‘s atmosphere has a way to be sucked into the fusing layer at some point. It just seems from everything that I’ve learned over the years that there’s a net outflow of that would likely keep the little atom some distance away even if it left Earths gravity well.
- tejtm 5y agoI see, if you are not already part of the "in crowd" below the photo-sphere can you get past the solar wind bouncers. I don't know, but think it would be tough for a lone atom.
- jancsika 5y agoWhat's the ballpark startup cost to get it up to supernova volume? Would scaling up production of Farnsworth fusors help?
- mysterEFrank 5y agohigh capex
- mgsouth 5y agoLeaseback. Think of the writedown! There's a _lot_ of money desperate for any kind of return. No, no, hear me out. You've got a couple of billion burning a hole in your pocket, right? And nothing that really looks unicorn material right now. So... we create this fund. It can't lose... it's got rocket science, so we grab all the Space X FOMOs. It's really really complicated to do, got ML stamped all over it. It's green. We'll peg it to a crypto; that'll get the speculators, and give us liquidity when the unicorn does come around... but you won't want to pull out.. I'm telling you, this is the biggest exit you'll ever see. It's a supernova!