How to Move the Sun: Stellar Engines

Nothing in the universe is static. In the Milky Way, billions of stars orbit the center of the galaxy. Some, like our star, have uniform orbits, staying at a distance of about 30,000 light years from the galactic center, completing one revolution every 230 million years. This dance is not a normal ballet, but rather a skating rink with "drunk" children. This chaos makes the galaxy dangerous. Our solar system is constantly changing and stars

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thousands of kilometers per second. Only large distances between objects protect against damage. But we may have bad luck in the future. At some point, we could get close to a star that goes supernova or a massive object that could hit Earth with asteroids.

If something like this happened, we would probably know thousands or millions of years in advance. But again we couldn't stop it. If only... we could knock the entire solar system out of its orbit. (Introduction) Translated by: Rigel To

move

the solar system, we would need a solar engine, a megastructure used to propel a star through the galaxy. It's the kind of vehicle that could build a civilization with "Dyson Sphere" level technology (a type of futuristic technology) thinking about its future millions of years in advance. But how can hundreds of thousands of objects in the solar system move? ?

The good news is that we can ignore them. (yay!) We only have to move the Sun, the others are attached to it by gravity and will follow it wherever it goes. There are many ideas about what a solar motor could look and work like. We have chosen 2, based on the current way of understanding Physics, that can be incorporated into the theory. The simplest form is the Shikadov thruster, a giant mirror. It works on the same principles as a rocket. Like rocket fuel, photons released as solar radiation have momentum, not a lot, but a little. For example, if an astronaut turned on a light in space, he would push it back very (very) slightly.

A solar engine would work a little better than a light because the Sun produces many more photons. The central idea of ​​the Shikadov thruster is to reflect up to half of the solar radiation, to create thrust and slowly move the fixed Sun wherever we want. For this to work, the Shikadov thruster must be kept in one place, not orbiting the Sun. Although the Sun's gravity would try to pull it in, it would be held up by radiation pressure, which pushes the mirror up. This means that the mirror would have to be very thin, made from a reflective aluminum sheet just a few microns wide.

The shape of the mirror is also important, because a spherical shell would simply redirect energy to the Sun, which would heat it up and create all kinds of problems. Instead, we would use a parabola, which sends most of the photons in one direction, maximizing the thrust. To prevent the Earth from accidentally burning up or freezing due to lack of light, the only safe place to build a Shikadov thruster is above the poles of the sun. This means that we can move the Sun vertically in the plane of the Solar System, and only in one direction in the Milky Way, which partially limits travel options.

But in principle that's all. For a civilization that can create a Dissonian Sphere, this is relatively simple. It's not complicated, just very difficult to build (logistical problems lol). At full capacity, the solar system can move about 100 light years in 230 million years. For several billion years, it gives us complete control over the solar orbit of the galaxy. But in the short term, it probably won't be fast enough to escape a supernova. So we thought we could improve it. So we asked our astrophysicist friend if he could design a faster solar motor for this video. (Harley-Skyvidson lol) He did it and wrote an article about it, which was published in a community (nerd) magazine.

You can find it in the resources document. We'll call our new solar engine Kaplan Thruster (sorry, Skyvidson :() It works much like a traditional rocket: it releases energy from one side and propels itself from the other. It's a huge space station powered by the Dyson Sphere that collects mass of the Sun to drive nuclear reactions. It fires bursts of energy at 1% the speed of light. A second burst pushes the Sun like a towbar. A Kaplan thruster requires a lot of fuel, millions of tons per second. fuel, our thruster uses magnetic fields to push hydrogen and helium from the solar wind into the engine, but the solar wind doesn't provide enough fuel, and that's where the Dyson Sphere comes into play.

Using its energy, solar power can. The mass can be collected and split into hydrogen and helium. Helium burns explosively in thermonuclear fusion reactions. A column of radioactive oxygen at a temperature of one billion degrees emerges and becomes the main source of propulsion for our solar engine. To prevent the engine from hitting the Sun, it must be balanced. To do this, we accelerate the hydrogen with magnetic fields using particle accelerators and launch a blast towards the Sun. This balances the engine and directs its power towards the Sun. In approximately 1 million years, this engine can move the Sun 50 light years, more than enough to expel a supernova.

At full power, the solar system can fully enter the galactic orbit for 10 million years. But wait, won't the Sun be wasted this way? Fortunately, the Sun is so massive that even billions of tons of material won't affect it at all. In fact, this megastructure would prolong its life, since low-mass stars burn more slowly, keeping the Solar System habitable for several billion more years. With the Kaplan thruster we will be able to return the solar system to our ship. For example, by orbiting in the galaxy, we can colonize hundreds of thousands of stars. It may even be possible to leave the galaxy completely and expand beyond the Milky Way.

Solar

engines

are the type of machinery built by civilizations that do not think in decades but in billions of years (1 eon is a billion years). Our Sun will one day die, a solar machine would allow the descendants of humans to travel to other stars without having to travel in the absolute darkness of interspace. Until we build a solar machine, we are helpless and subject to uncontrolled movements in the universe. We may not like where it will take us. Maybe our children's children will take off and become an inter

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species for millions of years. This was the last video of human year 12,019, and what a year it was!

So many things happened everywhere, to so many people. Calendars and holidays are purely imaginary, but they help us divide our lives into parts that our brain can understand. We leave 12,019 behind with a mixture of excitement and hope. The world is screwed, but we can fix it. In a few days the year will end and we can try again. Thank you for watching our videos and staying for so many years. See you in 12,020.