Astroengineering covers the possibility of manipulating a star to more efficiently extract the available energy. A typical star burns only several percent of the hydrogen. When the core hydrogen is exhausted it cools and reddens so that it enters the red giant phase. The surface expands, luminosity increases.
A question to an astrophysicist "So, what would you do, professor, when our raging sun is about to fry us?”
Try to mix in unused hydrogen in the outer envelope with the core. .
Martin Beech's
thoughts
With astroengineering could useful stellar life
be
extended, say by controlling luminosity? This could be done by mixing
core, inducing stellar mass loss (60%!), changing pressure by adjusting
the rotation rate, increasing opacity by introducing heavy elements, … These are
not easy astroengineering projects! Blue stragglers
Blue stragglers,
are hot, massive stars on the main sequence beyond the AGB turnoff.Beech suggested some blue straggler stars might be examples of astroengineering
This had been a mystery but Shara, et al. showed they could arise in “intimate” encounters between stars in crowded globular clusters. This is bad for planets, life.
A blue straggler is a “natural” example of a grand astroengineering project.
