Someone help me out: maybe that’s really magnetic for a star, but 43,000 gauss isn’t insanely strong, is it? We measure some magnets in teslas, which is 10,000 gauss.
So it’s a 4.3 tesla star.
I’m guessing this is somehow proportionate to the mass of the magnet, so a 1 tesla, 1 gram magnet is going to be much less powerful than a 1 tesla, 1 kg magnet? So something the size of a star would still have a massive magnetic field?
Well you have to put it in perspective. The earth has a magnetic field of 0.3 - 0.5 gauss. That puts this star at 143,000x as strong. Then you compare to the sun, which is 1 gauss, so this star is 43,000x as strong.
Okay, you might say, that's a lot, but this star is also 4x as massive as the sun. What about other stars bigger than the sun?
Beltugese is 16.5 - 19x the mass of the sun, and it's magnetic field has been carefully studied and measured to be about 1 gauss.
So yes, for a main sequence star this beast is a huge outlier.
You can’t do that because it will physically fall apart. That’s the main issue with boosting it up higher and just leaving it there. It was never designed to be existing for a thousand years, and eventually wear and tear will make the station naturally break apart. It’s significantly more dangerous for small fragments to drop over time as compared to a deorbit and decomm. At least the deorbit is planned, while the disintegration would be pretty random and not fun to deal with.
You can’t do that because it will physically fall apart.
Don’t know where you ever got that idea. It raises and lowers itself all of the time these days to avoid debris.
It could easily be raised to 2-5000 miles by adding energy from a similar small engine (with a decent-sized fuel tank) over a few months/years.
‘Wear and tear’ from what? Micrometeorites? The orbits of any ‘small fragments’ (of what?) would decay very slowly and instantly burn-up many centuries later.
[More recent work has seen pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) such as NANOGrav successfully identify a specific flavor of gravitational wave known as the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). The SGWB is similar in concept to the cosmic microwave background—a consistent glow from the early universe that astronomers can see as a series of microwaves coming from all directions at once.]
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