} Do you recall the ending of Arthur C.
Clarke’s movie 2010? Before the aston-
"ished eyes of a group of American and
| Soviet astronauts, mysterious and god-
\'like extraterrestrials implode Jupiter,
turning it into an artificial star. This
spectacular feat was not merely to ‘‘im-
"press the natives”’—although it did,
' World War Three was prevented—but
‘was also intended as a first step to enable
. ‘mankind to terraform Jupiter's Galilean
satellites.
I don’t know about you, but I left the
cinema disappointed. I couldn’t see how
Clarke’s method of stellifying Jupiter
" could possibly work. What I wanted to
~ know was if Clarke was merely pulling
‘a cosmic rabbit out of a very large hat,
or whether there was actually some sci-
entific rationale (however nebulous) for
: the ending of the movie. So I wrote to
- him, only to hear by return that Arthur
cannot now recall what was going
through his mind when he wrote 20/0’s
genesis. Obviously, there was magic
involved, of the type referred to in
Clarke’s Third Law: ‘‘Any sufficiently
Martyn J. Fogg
STELLIFYING
JUPITER
You've read many items
about terraforming—here’s
something a bit different.
advanced technology is indistinguisha-
ble from magic.”’
I was unsatisfied, even more so in
fact as I had just finished reading Vernor
Vinge’s superb Marooned in Realtime.
I enjoyed chapter eighteen; it was one
of the most spectacular fictional views
of the future I have ever read.
I found one quote particularly inspir-
ing: ‘‘Such a fine idea it was. Our par-
ent company liked big construction
projects. Originally, they wanted to
stellate Jupiter, but couldn't buy the
neccessary options.”
Stellifying Jupiter—what a thought!
But need we neccessarily invoke magic
or “‘superscience’’? The question I asked
myself was, ‘‘Is there any feasible scen-
ario for stellifying Jupiter permitted by
modern astrophysics?’
Is Implosion an Option?
Before we start tampering with Jupiter,
we should first ask ourselves how far
away is Jupiter from being 2 star in its
own right? Most astrophysicists are of
the opinion that a star must be aboveabout 8% of a solar mass for conditions
in its core to be right for sustained ther-
monuclear fusion reactions. Below this
mass we have “brown dwarfs,’’ stars
that burn deuterium, and other light cle-
ments such as lithium, to exhaustion as
they contract and thereafter cool to near
invisibility. No solitary brown dwarfs
have yet been discovered and it is
thought in any case that there is a lower
mass limit to the formation of these hy-
pothetical objects of about 2% of a solar
mass. Jupiter is only a thousandth the
mass of the Sun and so clearly is no-
where near being stellar. Any attempt
to ignite Jupiter without substantially
altering its physical parameters would
doubtless fizzle out.
The collapse of a portion of Jupiter
to enormous density is the alteration in
Jovian physical parameters that Clarke
appeared to be relying on at the end of
2010. One of his astronauts speculates
that Jupiter might even have been com-
pressed to the density of neutron matter
(about a thousand trillion grams per cu-
bic centimter), in effect turning the
planet into a low mass neutron star.
How would this new star shine? Well,
for a start, the collapse itself would re-
lease enormous quantities of gravita-
tional potential energy. This would
greatly heat the infalling matter, prob-
ably too much for comfort—an uncon-
trolled collapse would be the equivalent
of setting off a miniature supernova in
“the middle of the Solar System! If this
problem could be overcome, then one
might imagine the final configuration
of Jupiter as a central dense object sur-
rounded by an accreting shell or disc of
hydrogen. Whether thermonuclear re-
actions in this shell would proceed
smoothly or episodically is anyone’s
guess.
The collapse scenario has major prob-
tems. It is almost impossible to envisage
how the implosion of Jupiter might be
achieved without resorting to magic. It
also appears that the postulated end-
product, a Jovian mass neutron star,
would not be stable. Many SF readers
are used to the concept of small, handy,
chunks of neutron matter, as many SF
authors love throwing the stuff about to
achieve all sorts of spectacular effects.
A grapefruit-sized chunk of it would
weigh about half a trillion tons: no won-
der it’s irresistible! However, the only
bulk neutron matter we think may exist
in nature is within neutron stars and the
curious property of these stars is that
shrinking them in mass results in an in-
crease in their radius. In other words,
low mass objects made from neutron
matter are less dense than higher mass
objects. This implies a minimum mass
limit for objects made from neutron
matter, below which gravitational
compression is not sufficient to prevent
neutron decay back into protons and
electrons. Current models of neutron
stars suggest that this limit is from, 3 to
18% of the mass of the Sun. Thus we
can see straight away that Clarke’s den-
sified Jupiter would probably ‘‘bounce’’
and re-expand. Thus, magic would also
be needed to maintain Jupiter in ‘its re-
quired ultradense state!
Can we confidently say therefore that
stellifying Jupiter looks at the’ present
time to be totally impossible? Not nec-j essarily. An alternative way to stellify
the planet may be to not collapse Ju-
piter, but instead to introduce a col-
lapsed object into its core.
An Exotic Power Source for Jupiter
| We are obviously now talking about a
small black hole. How might this pro-
vide the energy output to stellify Jupi-
ter?
A black hole is created by the collapse
of an object to such a density that the
intensity of its gravitational field pre-
vents even photons from escaping its
_ surface. By ‘‘surface’’ I refer to the
event horizon: the boundary surround-
_ ing the black hole, cutting it off from
the rest of the Universe, where the es-
cape velocity is equal to the speed of
light. Normally, black holes are thought
to be created by the collapse of massive
stars. However, numerous small holes
of sub-stellar mass may have come into
existence in the first moments of the
Universe—I’ll return to these later.
Because black holes have such con-
centrated gravity fields, they thus strongly
attract any matter in their vicinity. As
matter falls into the hole, gravitational
potential energy is released, resulting
in phenomenal heating and the produc-
tion of an enormous flood of radiation.
That’s the simple picture—but what size
of hole would we need to stellify Jupiter
and how might it behave inside a planet?
To answer this we will have to look
at accretion power in more detail, but
not too much! The whole subject is im-
mensely complex and still clouded in
a great deal of uncertainty. A realistic
study of black hole accretion must take
into account, amongst other things, the
temperature, density, angular momen-
tum and composition of the infalling
matter; the presence of magnetic fields;
thermonuclear fusion of matter com-
pressed close to the hole and both the
hole’s rotation and its relative ‘motion
with respect to the medium it is passing
through. Scientists have considered ac-
cretion onto black holes within a number
of astrophysical contexts, but nobody,
to my knowledge, has looked at intra-
planetary black holes. This is hardly
surprising, somebody would have to put
a black hole inside a planet; this is not
the sort of trick performed by nature!
OK, it’s complicated, but let’s try to
ease our speculation by looking first at
three generic types of black hole accre-
tion that have been modelled.
1) Spherically symmetric accretion.
To simplify the problem, early studies
of black hole accretion assumed infall-
ing gas had no angular momentum with
respect to the hole and that the hole was
Stationary and non-rotating. Infall of
matter would therefore be spherically
symmetric. The closest to this idealized
situation in nature would be an isolated
black hole accreting from the interstellar
medium. It turns out that this mode of
accretion does not heat up the gas very
well (in some models infalling gas ac-
tually cools within a certain distance
from the hole) and so it would not pro-
duce very high luminosities. Estimates
for the conversion of rest-mass energy
to radiation in this case range from very
low values to up to 2%. For comparison,
thermonuclear fusion is about half a
percent efficient, so that in most cases