From: mt90dac@brunel.ac.uk (Del Cotter)
Newsgroups: alt.sci.planetary
Subject: Re: Stellifying Jupiter
Date: 19 Mar 93 13:17:09 GMT
Organization: Brunel University, West London, UK

<11776@news.duke.edu> jaberwok@carr4.acpub.duke.edu (Teman H. Cooke) writes:

>	What would it take to convert Jupiter into a sun, and if it were
>	converted, how would the rest of the solar system react (Earth in
>	particular)?

A black hole, plus some *really* impressive technology.

I'll try to find a paper I've got back home called 

'Stellifying Jupiter' by Martyn Fogg
(Sorry, can't remember the journal title)

The idea is, if you can find or make a hole, then drop it into Jupiter
it will warm the Galilean moons for hundreds of millions of years.

("Dropping" it, incidentally, is far from being the easiest part of the
operation.  Suppose you can move your hole to the edge of the atmosphere
and let go.  Now, how do you get it to stop yoyoing through the centre
on an eccentric ellipse for the dozen millenia, spraying the Galileans
with X-rays every time it pops out of the atmosphere?)

Anyway, so you've got it to settle down in the core.  It then starts to
eat Jupiter.  You've picked just the right size so it barely warms Io.
But it's getting bigger all the time.  Slowly it grows, consuming the
planet and warming it so that first Europa, then Ganymede and Callisto
are converted to balmy paradises (Io has been abandoned by this time -
too hot).

Everybody here heard of 'The Sorceror's Apprentice'?

You're ahead of me, of course.  As the invisible worm grows fat, the 
planet glows brighter, faster.  And you can't stop it!  Eventually it 
cooks the whole Solar System, including Earth.  Fogg proposes to leave 
this little detail as an exercise for our descendants.

And they call *me* crazy!

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