Friday, January 11, 2019

Celestial Crystal Spheres...

...or perhaps star corpses. It turns out that stars of a certain size, when they finally die, turn into giant crystal balls. No, I'm not kidding.

White dwarf stars slowly crystallize from the inside out, forming cores of metallic carbon and oxygen. This process takes a lot longer than we thought white dwarf stars lived.

Oh, and stars of a certain size?

That includes the sun. By that time, though, the sun will long since have expanded into a red giant and if we aren't off this rockball (or already extinct) by then...

(Still, visiting the sun's crystal corpse would be a cool scene for a House of Suns or Peter K. Hamilton-style extreme space opera).

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