Re: Colonizing a Neutron Star

Logan Kearsley wrote:
It's no good if the satellite crashes, but getting pushed away isn't nearly
so much of a problem; there are ways of moving it back in, and in the
meantime it just results in slightly lessened gravity and power production.

Well, in long run will have to move satellite back as fast as it moves away. What method are you thinking of for doing this? Will it be cheaper than just relying on other power source? In particular, can it not consume reaction mass?

That's countered by the fact that they have far less surface area and
reduced emissivity, though.
According to http://www.extrasolar.net/planettour.asp?PlanetID=26,
PSR-1257+12, with an effective temperature of 600,000K, would only look
about a bright as the full moon from its innermost planet at .19AU. Of
course, it's also emitting an enormous amount of non-visible radiation.

Well let's put some numbers on it.

With a bit of trial and error, for a couple of solar masses, I get (to within a factor of 2 or thereabouts):

Gravity at:
100 Mm radius = 100g
101 Mm radius = 98g

So 2g diff across a 1 Mm habitat, which is what we're looking for.

Assume star is 10 km size, so that's 10^-4 radian size. Sun is about 10^-2 radian, so that's 10^-4 solar luminosity for same temperature.

But luminosity is T^4, so only needs to be 10 times as hot, 60,000 K, to compensate.

And temperature here is 600,000 K.

So insolation for habitat is 10,000 times what Earth gets from its sun. Vaporized habitat time, alas.

Need to find very old neutron star. Is universe old enough for a neutron star to cool to 60,000 K? If so that works. Most of output will be far UV, not visible light, of course. UV corrodes solar panels. Does that indicate a heat engine is better solution?

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