Jeff Davis wrote:
>
>
> The issue of the lack of IR radiation plus the dark matter business leads
> me to a question I've been mulling over. Could advanced civilizations halt
> the unbridled stellar fusion and save the fuel for a more orderly regime of
> consumption? (Is this anything like the *star lifting* business that I've
> heard about?) This seems to me to combine the observed features of
> substantial quantities of dark mass and low IR emissions, while still
> allowing the matter in question to be baryonic rather than something exotic.
>
> Hope I'm not embarrassing myself.
The upper strata of stars is almost completely hydrogen. Helium and any
higher elements tend to congregate lower down due to their higher atomic
mass. Removing hydrogen from the surface in appreciable quantities
accelerates the aging of the star. Unless your entities are only
harvesting brown dwarfs and small red dwarfs (which you could possibly
shut down the fusion in and turn them to brown dwarfs if they are small
enough), there would be evidence of a nova wherever they harvested a too
large star. Pre aged stars would also stick out on the main sequence
chart as well as a blip in the curve.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:34:49 MDT