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Types of stars and black holes

#1
I looked around for this kind of thing, but didn't see it. It's both a suggestion and a question... sortof. The question is how much of this is already being done.

I think it would be great for the systems to have lots of variety in terms of what stellar objects the planets are orbiting around.
For example, you could have binary or trinary stars; or black hole systems, or a combination of black hole and star (with an accretion disk!) .

I'm certain there will be different types of stars, (I don't think there were any Wolf-Rayet stars in Freelancer. It would be cool to have a few of those), but I think it would also be great to include different types of black holes, like Stellar black holes and luminous black holes, and at least (or most) one supermassive black hole somewhere (this could potentially occupy the space of several star systems, simply obstructing travel while looking cool).

If you want to get theoretical, you could also put out miniature black holes (like, the size of a planet, or moon orbiting a planet). They could look really cool, and you could have trade stations or water clouds orbiting them, or there could be mini-quasars in the middle of eating asteroid fields, or orbiting and shredding planets at the same time.

While we're being theoretical, depending on how far into the future this game takes place, it could have some rare solid iron stars. These could either be "new" and still red-hot balls of iron magma, or "old" existing in dark systems which get all their light from other surrounding systems. They would be shiny since there's nothing to oxidize them, and they could have a dim red glow in the center. An asteroid field in a dust cloud in such a system might be very dark and very inconvenient to navigate, and may provide some merit for putting headlights on our ships.

Finally, if there will be binary or trinary (or more complex if you wanna do the math) systems, it would be cool to have the stars orbit one another fast enough to watch them move. Most binary+ star systems are actually orbiting pretty quickly (the fastest known binary orbit is 5 minutes). I don't expect the planets themselves to move, necessarily, since that could greatly complicate space travel and trade lanes -- not to mention code -- but binary stars and binary black holes should move.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#2
boxcartenant wrote: While we're being theoretical, depending on how far into the future this game takes place, it could have some rare solid iron stars. These could either be "new" and still red-hot balls of iron magma, or "old" existing in dark systems which get all their light from other surrounding systems. They would be shiny since there's nothing to oxidize them, and they could have a dim red glow in the center.
pretty much impossible to exist in a universe where stars still shine
boxcartenant wrote: Finally, if there will be binary or trinary (or more complex if you wanna do the math) systems, it would be cool to have the stars orbit one another fast enough to watch them move. Most binary+ star systems are actually orbiting pretty quickly (the fastest known binary orbit is 5 minutes). I don't expect the planets themselves to move, necessarily, since that could greatly complicate space travel and trade lanes -- not to mention code -- but binary stars and binary black holes should move.
inconsistent mechanics are inconsistent.

why do suns move and planets not?

also: everything planet sized or larger is immobile per engine necessity.
the engine cant handle movable objects of that size
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#3
Cornflakes_91 wrote: pretty much impossible to exist in a universe where stars still shine
I don't know. I think it's possible. Every time a star goes supernova, there's a chance that its molecules will fuse into iron rather than decay, so some stars will become iron stars faster than others. Also stars are constantly being formed in molecular clouds. The reason we don't have iron stars now (as far as we know), is either because our universe is new or because we just haven't detected one yet, (or because they're completely impossible to form for some reason). Until recently, a "new universe" was considered to be the only possibility because the laws of thermodynamics say that energy always moves from high-density to low-density, so the energy should be evenly dispersed in the universe.

However, by applying some new relativistic principles to the known laws, theoretical physicists are now examining the possibility of an infinitely old universe. If that's the case, then we'll surely find at least one iron star out there, eventually. Also, we have to keep in mind that if one goes down a theoretical rabbit hole long enough one can arrive at literally any conclusion, and if the path was complicated enough then nobody will question it for a long time. For example, the sum of all integers 1 to infinity is -1/12.
Cornflakes_91 wrote: why do suns move and planets not?
also: everything planet sized or larger is immobile per engine necessity.
the engine cant handle movable objects of that size
Well... I suppose you could justify it saying that we're moving relative to the planets, so from our perspective the surrounding systems would be moving, and the planets would be getting nearer and farther apart in orbit. I just wanted it for aesthetics, though.

Now as for the engine -- that makes sense if he did it the say you said. However, if the suns are just going to be distant balls of light, then they could potentially be sprited and there would be literally no visible difference. I don't know how much coding this would take to implement, so I'm gonna say you're right on this point.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#4
boxcartenant wrote: I don't know. I think it's possible. Every time a star goes supernova, there's a chance that its molecules will fuse into iron rather than decay, so some stars will become iron stars faster than others. Also stars are constantly being formed in molecular clouds. The reason we don't have iron stars now (as far as we know), is either because our universe is new or because we just haven't detected one yet, (or because they're completely impossible to form for some reason). Until recently, a "new universe" was considered to be the only possibility because the laws of thermodynamics say that energy always moves from high-density to low-density, so the energy should be evenly dispersed in the universe.

However, by applying some new relativistic principles to the known laws, theoretical physicists are now examining the possibility of an infinite universe. If that's the case, then we'll surely find at least one iron star out there, eventually.

you have overread that while the universe itself is infinite in age, the current possible lifetime of matter is not.

the universe has no beginning, but before the "big bang" it was a very very dense soup of exotic matter having nothing to do with normal matter.

theres just no singularity before the big bang, but also nothing that resembles anything that could form a star.

the big bang just wasnt the beginning of everything, but a big expansion that enabled normal matter to exist.

the possible lifetime until now for a star would still be the 13.8 billion years that "the universe" is old.

and considering the processes that lead to the creation of pure iron stars (according to the link you provided) are so extremely slow that any other matter would have been burned / decayed long before that time.

boxcartenant wrote: Now as for the engine -- that makes sense if he did it the say you said. However, if the suns are just going to be distant balls of light, then they could potentially be sprited and there would be literally no visible difference. I don't know how much coding this would take to implement, so I'm gonna say you're right on this point.
they arent distant balls of light, they are physical objects placed in the game world.

with collision and stuff.

and collision requires a mesh to be there, and this prevents a star to be a movable object.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#5
Awesome. I'm so glad you're in this forum. Before I dive any deeper into this, I wanna point out that I'm not a physicist, so if you aren't a physicist either then we're debating in a vacuum.

That said...
Cornflakes_91 wrote: the universe has no beginning, but before the "big bang" it was a very very dense soup of exotic matter having nothing to do with normal matter....
the big bang just wasnt the beginning of everything, but a big expansion that enabled normal matter to exist....
Alright, I think I see what you mean, and you are describing a viable if not commonly accepted explanation for the origin of the universe -- but I'll be honest, I don't buy the singularity or the exotic matter theories, because I think that "singularity" and "exotic matter" are just as much catch-all phrases describing things we don't understand as "God created". Also, both theories leave us in a chicken-or-egg scenario, because they enforce that matter as we know it can't exist forever. IMHO, the most reasonable theories I've heard so far, within the realm of things we already understand, are:

a) "Quantum fluctuations", whereby the matter in the universe was generated by randomly wobbling energies. Eventually we decay back into energy and maybe sometime in the future they will wobble into condensation again. I think this violates Thermodynamics as I understand it, but it's possible that we've misunderstood thermodynamics, or that they don't apply to energy at that level.

b) The universe and matter have always existed, as we know them. Matter is being destroyed in suns and created in black holes, and when two bodies collide or pass too closely they burst into smaller bodies. Partitions of the universe are moving on generally non-intersecting trajectories, being held together by gravitons and pulled apart by energy's natural tendency to disperse. So, just as in a frictionless vacuum an object never stops moving, the universe has some perfect balance keeping it from dying completely.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#6
boxcartenant wrote:Awesome. I'm so glad you're in this forum. Before I dive any deeper into this, I wanna point out that I'm not a physicist, so if you aren't a physicist either then we're debating in a vacuum.
I'm am an astrophysicist. I study things in a vacuum! Where does that leave us?
Alright, I think I see what you mean, and you are describing a viable if not commonly accepted explanation for the origin of the universe -- but I'll be honest, I don't buy the singularity or the exotic matter theories
No one takes singularities in physics seriously. They're just areas where current theory breaks down. We all know this. We all accept this. We're all immensely bored by this. It's the media and the pop-science guys who get their undies in a knot over singularities, because rule of cool or some junk.
Also, both theories leave us in a chicken-or-egg scenario, because they enforce that matter as we know it can't exist forever.
They actually don't. "Matter as we know it" having a genesis point doesn't imply that it has a terminal point. Things can begin but never end. It's quantum mechanics that suggests that matter as we know it can't exist forever.
a) "Quantum fluctuations", whereby the matter in the universe was generated by randomly wobbling energies. Eventually we decay back into energy and maybe sometime in the future they will wobble into condensation again. I think this violates Thermodynamics as I understand it, but it's possible that we've misunderstood thermodynamics, or that they don't apply to energy at that level.
I'm not sure how this violates thermodynamics. The amount of energy in this model doesn't change. There's just a bunch of it stored in the vacuum energy, and at each phase shift the vacuum dumps a bunch of its energy into matter. It's not a true recycling programme; it just extends the feasible life of matter in the universe by a few universal generations.
b) The universe and matter have always existed, as we know them. Matter is being destroyed in suns and created in black holes, and when two bodies collide or pass too closely they burst into smaller bodies. Partitions of the universe are moving on generally non-intersecting trajectories, being held together by gravitons and pulled apart by energy's natural tendency to disperse. So, just as in a frictionless vacuum an object never stops moving, the universe has some perfect balance keeping it from dying completely.
Steady State really died a quick death with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. It really can't explain the CMB. It can't really deal with the observed galactic red-shifts, either, no matter how much tired light enthusiasts want to claim otherwise.


There's a really, really funny thing happening with this "no big bang" revelation: It's not being covered in the scientific press. It's getting a lot of coverage on the back pages of mainstream media sites, and on the front pages of religious news sites, but the scientific press doesn't seem to care one iota.

The common coverage of this, by the way, is horrible. I have seen exactly ONE mainstream press article that got within a thousand light-years of explaining current big bang cosmology even remotely correctly, and that article basically consisted of nothing but quotes from a cosmologist.

There's not a lot of coverage in the scientific press for a few reasons:

1) The model is preliminary, and very, very rough. Its big advancement is applying some quantum mechanical principles to the high density ("early") state of the big bang. Most cosmological models use purely classical physics to describe the expansion of the universe, and classical physics breaks down at "zero volume" because zero volume is a mathematical possibility in classical physics.

It's not in some variations of quantum mechanics. Nothing can be smaller than the planck length, which means there's no zero volume.

This is an expected result. The big news would have been if quantum mechanics on those scales still produced a singularity.

2) The model is almost certainly wrong. On the scales it's concerned about, it's probably less wrong that current models, but it doesn't present a cohesive theory of quantum gravity, which means it's a small (though potentially important) step forward. Assuming it holds up after being made more robust. It's not much more than a toy model at this piont.

3) It was published as a letter, which don't get a lot of coverage. It's a follow up to a previous paper by the authors which suggested, basically, the same thing, so it may have been covered a few years ago. I suspect the biggest reason, though, is that what the mainstream press is covering (as has become usual in science coverage) is a press release, and the scientific press has become increasingly wary of science-by-press-release. At the very least, the authors were smart and did their press-release properly: They waited until their letter was published. But the science media is quite gun-shy about press-releases now.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#7
boxcartenant wrote: Alright, I think I see what you mean, and you are describing a viable if not commonly accepted explanation for the origin of the universe -- but I'll be honest, I don't buy the singularity or the exotic matter theories, because I think that "singularity" and "exotic matter" are just as much catch-all phrases describing things we don't understand as "God created".
lolwut.

i could also have called that "pre-big bang" matter a quark gluon plasma instead of exotic matter, which likely would describe it more precisely
exotic matter is simply a catch-all-phrase for matter states we dont understand (yet), 50 years ago the stuff we are creating in CERN would be described as exotic matter
maybe we'll understand the matter state pre-expansion and have a proper name for it, maybe not.
but our current lack of understanding doesnt make it "god created", at least not more than the alternatives you provided.

i also just explained the theory you linked to, so if you dont buy it, why do you link to it as an argument?
boxcartenant wrote: Also, both theories leave us in a chicken-or-egg scenario, because they enforce that matter as we know it can't exist forever.
your alternatives arent egg free either.

also: why should matter to be able to exist forever?

why should that be so?

and: how does that create a chicken and egg problem?

just because they forbid infinite existence of "conventional matter", they dont forbid matter in general to exist, not preventing cyclical big crunch - big bang events.
boxcartenant wrote:a) "Quantum fluctuations", whereby the matter in the universe was generated by randomly wobbling energies. Eventually we decay back into energy and maybe sometime in the future they will wobble into condensation again. I think this violates Thermodynamics as I understand it, but it's possible that we've misunderstood thermodynamics, or that they don't apply to energy at that level.
where did time start?

where did space start?

where came the initial energy to condense from?

boxcartenant wrote:b) The universe and matter have always existed, as we know them. Matter is being destroyed in suns and created in black holes, and when two bodies collide or pass too closely they burst into smaller bodies. Partitions of the universe are moving on generally non-intersecting trajectories, being held together by gravitons and pulled apart by energy's natural tendency to disperse. So, just as in a frictionless vacuum an object never stops moving, the universe has some perfect balance keeping it from dying completely.
matter isnt destroyed in suns, its transformed

into photons, neutrinos and different other forms of particles and radiation

if the universe were infinite in the form you describe, no solid matter could exist, as the universe would be saturated with ever increasing amounts of radiation, breaking molecular bonds

and as black holes only get more, not less, this process would accelerate due to your "matter is being created in black holes", as theres more and more matter to be transformed into radiation.

this scenario also has the chicken and egg problem:

where came the first black hole from?

again "god created" stuff.


the "no big bang" theory is more likely to be valid as it avoids the same problems:

why did it start?

where came the matter from?

where did it start if space hasnt existed before?

how could it happen without time existing?


all that problems get away with the "no big bang"

there was no beginning, and all was there all the time.

it also fits observations, as the CMB for example.


also: everything that Kichae said



btw:
boxcartenant wrote:Matter is being destroyed in suns and created in black holes
WAT

i'd like to see a paper on that theories.

until then:
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Last edited by Cornflakes_91 on Wed Feb 18, 2015 10:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#8
Cornflakes_91 wrote: btw:
Matter is being destroyed in suns and created in black holes
WAT

i'd like to see a paper on that theories.
boxcar's details are a little... confused, but he's describing the steady state model of cosmology championed by Fred Hoyle and a few others going back to the 1940s. Hoyle was a strict adherent to the Copernican Principle (the idea that there's nothing special about our place in the universe), to the point where he also believed that there's nothing special about our time in the universe, either.

Before general relativity, an infinitely old universe was the basic assumption. The idea that the universe had a beginning was considered to be unscientific (in fact, it was considered to be downright religious). The idea that the universe could just pop into existence seemed ridiculous. Even after GR, it still seemed ridiculous. That's why Einstein modified GR so that it would result in a static, eternal universe.

It was only after Hubble observed the relationship between redshift and distance that the idea that things like galaxies actually moved became accepted (keep in mind that the very idea of galaxies is less than a century old, and was only really settled in the 1930s). When it was realized that just about every galaxy was moving away from us, the obvious conclusion was that, at some point in the past, all of those galaxies were in the same place at the same time.

That suggested that there was a special time in the universe (it may not have been "now", but there shouldn't be any in the extreme version of the Copernican Principle), which did not sit well with Hoyle et al. So, they proposed that galaxies were born, gradually, pretty much out of the aether as the universe expanded.

It sounds ridiculous, but remember that at the time (the 40s and 50s), it was pretty much a choice between "all matter anywhere ever appeared out of nowhere all at once from the gods only know where" and "matter appears slowly and gradually from the gods only know where, for all of infinite time". They're really not all that different!

Except that one predicts that the universe of the past was very hot and dense, while the other predicts that the universe of the past looked pretty much exactly like the universe of today.

The CMB is the light from that hot, dense phase of the universe, which is really biggest thing that rules out the steady state model.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#11
Kichae Chandramani wrote:
boxcartenant wrote:Awesome. I'm so glad you're in this forum. Before I dive any deeper into this, I wanna point out that I'm not a physicist, so if you aren't a physicist either then we're debating in a vacuum.
I'm am an astrophysicist. I study things in a vacuum! Where does that leave us?
Wow cool! I appreciate your patience. My above comment was intended to acknowledge cornflakes_91's intelligence, and suggest that I was about to engage in discussing something I know little about.

Now, I hope you'll let me take advantage of this opportunity to learn from you.
Kichae Chandramani wrote:The CMB is the light from that hot, dense phase of the universe, which is really biggest thing that rules out the steady state model.
Could you describe CMB more for me? Where I used to not understand it at all, what you've said makes me think it radiated out from the matter in the universe a long time ago, when it was hot and dense. If that's the case, why are we able to detect it? Is it slow moving, so that our planet keeps pace with it, or is it leaving some sort of trail? Which direction is it radiating from, if it isn't radiating out of nothing?
Cornflakes_91 wrote: where did time start?

where did space start?

where came the initial energy to condense from?
I don't suppose time needed to "start", since "before" it there was no time, and so there was no "before" or "after" or "during" a "period" without time. That period before time would have to be continuing somehow apart from our existence even now, perhaps in the form of nonexistence. I think the question itself proposes a paradox because our definitions for the words "time" and "start" are ambiguous. This could be because we don't understand the nature of time.

Space, if you mean emptiness or nothingness... I don't know if it even exists.

In the model where the energy condenses -- the idea was that it was just there in that state forever. However, as Kichae mentioned:
Kichae Chandramani wrote: There's just a bunch of it stored in the vacuum energy, and at each phase shift the vacuum dumps a bunch of its energy into matter. It's not a true recycling programme; it just extends the feasible life of matter in the universe by a few universal generations.
So if it were there forever, it would have to be a true recycling programme; that's why I supposed it violated thermodynamics. The vacuums are an area of relatively high energy density. After the vacuums are depleted, in order for energy to accumulate, it would have to move from areas of low density to higher density on its own (this, as I understand it, is the violation).
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#12
boxcartenant wrote:Now, I hope you'll let me take advantage of this opportunity to learn from you.
It's kinda what I do. Please, by all means.
Could you describe CMB more for me? Where I used to not understand it at all, what you've said makes me think it radiated out from the matter in the universe a long time ago, when it was hot and dense. If that's the case, why are we able to detect it? Is it slow moving, so that our planet keeps pace with it, or is it leaving some sort of trail? Which direction is it radiating from, if it isn't radiating out of nothing?
The CMB certainly isn't slow moving. It's light (microwaves, but still light), and moves at the speed of light.

You know how if you heat an object up enough, it will start to glow (think electric coil stove tops, or incandescent light bulbs)? Well, that's the exact same thing that causes stars to glow, and it's the exact same thing that caused the CMB. Compressing a gas causes it to heat up (P = nkT; increase the pressure (P) causes the temperature (T) to increase), and early in the universe the gas was very compressed compared to today. Being so compressed, we expect it to be hot. Hot enough to glow brighter than the surface of a star, even.

Now, this gas was everywhere. Remember, the big bang isn't an expansion from a point in space (i.e. it's not an explosion), but rather it's the expansion of space-time itself. This gas was everywhere, and so everywhere was glowing hotter than the surface of the sun (indeed, at the very earliest of times, it would have been hotter than the cores of stars, and some nuclear fusion actually took place due to the high temperatures and densities. This is where primordial deuterium, helium, and lithium comes from).

And again, this was everywhere.

Now, at those kinds of temperatures there are no atoms. It's too hot for electrons to remain bound to atomic nuclei. This left a stupendous amount of free electrons flying around, and clouds of free electrons are opaque to light. The light photons scatter off of electrons like they're billiard balls. Eventually, though, as the universe expanded, the pressure and density dropped due to the space in between the particles increasing, and that forced the temperature down. At some point, the temperature dropped to the point where electrons could remain bound to nuclei. The free electrons disappeared, and there was nothing left for the photons to scatter off of. Neutral atoms are, by and large, invisible to photons (except at very specific wavelengths; thank you quantum mechanics!), so the light that was once tied up in this soup of electrons, bare nuclei, and photons was freed, and sent off to travel pretty much forever in whichever direction it was moving at that time.

The thing about light, though, is that while it's very, very fast, it still travels at a finite speed. Compared to the size of space, that speed is actually painfully slow! I mean, just watch this video by Alphonse Swinehart (if you haven't already) to get an idea: Riding Light

So, the gas that was in what would eventually become our Solar System freed its light almost 14 billion years ago, and that light ran off in every direction. It crossed the equivalent of our Solar System in a few hours, never to return. A few hours after that happened, though, light from regions that were a few light-hours away from us streamed through here. And a few hours later still, light from a further few light-hours away passed what would become us by.

You know how light from an object that is X light-years away from us took X years to reach us? Well, that's also true of the CMB. In super simplistic terms, we're seeing the light that was freed from the hot cosmic soup in a region of space 13.8 billion light-years away from us. It's just reaching us now because it took 13.8 billion years for the light to cover that distance. (In reality, it's a little more complex than that; in an expanding universe, those regions of space were actually closer to us at the time they became transparent, but the amount of space between there and here has grown over the intervening time, so it has had to cover the equivalent of 13.8 billion light-years. Those regions of space, however, were originally about 3 or 4 billion light-years away, and are, today, over 40 billion light-years away from us).

The CMB represents what astronomers call the "surface of last scattering". It's the last bit of cosmic fog burning off far enough away from us that it has taken the entire age of the transparent universe to reach us. Tomorrow, that light will becoming from one light-day farther away than it did today.

So if it were there forever, it would have to be a true recycling programme; that's why I supposed it violated thermodynamics. The vacuums are an area of relatively high energy density. After the vacuums are depleted, in order for energy to accumulate, it would have to move from areas of low density to higher density on its own (this, as I understand it, is the violation).
Who said anything about the vacuum energy re-accumulating? Under current models that lean that way, once the energy has been condensed into matter, it never goes back. The well runs dry.
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Re: Types of stars and black holes

#14
Can't we just leave it at "all star systems are procedurally generated"? Having black holes, iron stars and supernovas in visitable systems may sound cool on paper, but are unlikely to show up anytime soon because they wouldn't be very fun.

Say you were in a system where the sun was going supernova. Do you really want to hang around for the fireworks? Odds are, you're ship will be destroyed with you in it. Black holes also sound fun until you realize there is no way you should be getting close enough to "see" it. If a black hole is close enough to visibly eat asteroids, you're probably next.

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