What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

Image...
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”

(This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)


Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”


It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?



http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-10/what-would-happen-if-i-ate-teas...
  2. groups:
    Comedy,   Tech,   Upstream,   Webmash,   14 more
  3. tags:
    Health,  Science,  Energy,  Diet, 27 more + add
pjacobs51
  • added November 12, 2009

7 comments // What Would Happen if You Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?

  •  

    Cute while still maintaining Morbidity. Two thumbs up!

    melynda
  •  

    this was a good article!

    sidewaysclyde
  •  

    well,............SUPERMAN could do it,...U-betcha! (and superdog would fer sure,...dogs will eat anything)
    p.s. Whats worse than a dog fart? ---A PLASMA DOG FART!

    remanns
  •  

    And talk about weight gain issues!
    p.s.--------And Superdog wouldn't be allowed to excrete anywhere in the WHOLE DAMN COUNTRY without a protest!

    remanns
  •  

    Talk about the "Table of Elements".

    ......"but Star eating,....is it right for YOU"?

    remanns
  •  

    Nice, just like the drugs you see on tv today... here's an example..

    fast, pounding, or uneven heartbeat;
    weakness, tremors (uncontrolled shaking), or sleep problems (insomnia);
    severe restless feeling, hyperactivity;
    confusion;
    blood clots;
    problems with vision; or
    urinating less than usual or not at all.
    Less serious drug side effects may include:

    dizziness, drowsiness;
    tired feeling;
    dry mouth;
    sore throat, cough;
    nausea, constipation; or
    headache.

    and just imagine, this is only for allergies! lol... =D Bring on the Dwarf Star!!

    recommended by remanns
    KSirys
    1 comment on this
keep browsing
Comedy
Tech
Upstream
15 more groups
most popular

current videos