White dwarf stars are mostly ultra dense iron about the size of earth with the gravity about half that of the sun. It’s often described that a tablespoon if white drawf would weight as much as a car. But would that density remain roughly the same if you were to separate said tablespoon of material from the white dwarf?
Is the density of dead star material like a white drawf or neutron star entirely reliant on its gravity or is it stable without gravity?
take this with a pinch of salt since I have iq of a goldfish,
but material itself is dense (spoon of super nova weights few billion tons) and just taking a spoon of neutron star wouldn’t work since it would just break down and release it’s energy.
gravity holds it together so to some degree it affects it
If gravity would break the star would simply dissibate. Huge gravity caused by the mass of the star keeps it together.
Imagine taking a tablespoon of an explosion. As soon as it’s not affected by such gravity, it would dissipate.
So yeah, it’s only held together by gravity.
Edit:
Or to say this is a theorem. No-one has ever jabbed a spoon into a star (as far as we know).
I’m not sure about neutronstars.
Actually this is a hard question.
I’ll come back to this.
Edit 2:
Neutron Stars should be solid and just radiate. So it would stick to the spoon.
White dwarves consist from mostly from crushed helium atoms… so it would make sense that the material would be solid helium-atom-mass which doesn’t require gravity to be held in place.
Mass causes it’s own gravity. You can’t have mass and not have it have it’s own gravitational field. I think a literal table spoon would retain the same density and other characteristics as a real white dwarf. It’s jst so much goddamn mass crammed into such a small area.
I tried to major in astrophysics but dropped out because I couldn’t master linear algebra. I could be wrong about the above it was a long time ago.
First:
On question about gravity of wierd shit I always used the Gauss’s flux theorem (applied to Gravity) when I was a student, long time ago. Maybe it can help you.
Second:
It’s offending to call them Dwarf Star. They prefer Little Star
Lol I started my major in physics but after 2 semesters determined that there are no real jobs for that, at least is you aren’t from an Ivy league. I switched to statistics and business analytics.
Agree 100% with this statement. Literal definition.
This is an analogy. Analogies are absolute rubbish when trying to understand things. They work great at describing things, however.
I apologize for what follows. No, really.
You’ve conflated two things here. Gravity and density.
The units tell the story (I’ll use metric in lieu of Freedom Units):
Density units are mass per unit volume (typically kg/m^3)
Gravity is measured in the product of mass with length, then divided by unit time squared (kg*m/s^2, i.e., a Newton - the basic measure of force).
Density is an intensive property of a given substance…water, air, the compacted iron core of a main sequence star approaching the end of its thermal life, and so on. A substance has the same density, regardless of how little or how much you have of it. I think using the term density on celestial, radiating objects is a mistake, because there are a lot of different substances within them, but that’s neither here nor there.
Gravity is a “relative” force (or interaction) that is strictly defined by the masses between two or more objects.
The same property (mass) that gives a substance its density also determines its influence in a gravitation field. But that doesn’t mean these things are necessarily related.
Remember that on the Apollo 15 mission, they simultaneously dropped a feather and a hammer on the moon. Those objects had different densities (and masses), but they fell at the same rate.
It’s a great question. Assuming you’re still awake…
If we would have a magical spoon and we could scoop up a spoonful (insert small volume 2cl?) of Neutron Star, and leave it in a void, would it hold it’s mass and remain as a spoonful of neutron star or would it dissipate?
Would the crushed atoms yeeeeet (boom!) as the massive gravity is released?
There’s a mathematical way go count it, but isn’t the question:
“would a volume x of neutron star plasma/matter remain it’s form in vacuum?”
Well I guess I’m confused now…becaue OP was asking about White Dwarfs…so where are Neutron Stars involved?
My understanding (and I’m an engineer, so we tend to get a little too into the weeds) is that a white dwarf is a result of the eventual reduction of fusion products of a main sequence star (like our sun in 20 billion years or so)…while a neutron star is the remnant of a supernova (whatever the type is, or can it happen from all types of supernovae, I can’t remember).
But again, as I said in my post, I think density is the wrong term here…because talking about a star, even a failed star, you’re looking at a literal reactor, plus the “chamber” where the emitted products reside, plus whatever is left of the original “fuel” stock, and then the plasma and the rest of the electrical crap that goes along with all of that.
I think part of the confusion is that gravity allows the material to accrete and at a certain point, because of the buildup of mass, enough pressure is formed to start the reaction that leads to a star’s formation. But gravity is the weakest of the forces in nature…I would assume there are also strong and weak nuclear forces as well as electromagnetic forces at work in stars.
It makes sense to me that those other forces would be as applicable, if not more, in determining what happens with our hypothetical spoon to our hypothetical white dwarf (now neutron star), right?
We’re out of my experience and training, that’s for certain. My dad was one of about 12,000 people involved in getting the next-to-most-recent operational nuclear plant in the US online back in 1993, and that’s about as close as I’ve gotten to nuclear stuff in general (until I watched Chernobyl, at any rate).
My thought for this question comes from the basic principles of fusion in a star, how the “explosion” pushes out the mass of the star in balance with the gravity squeezing in. Taking away the nuclear reaction, you are left with a ultra dense iron core or neutron.
The neutron star was a second object with the same question, 2 separate questions really. Apologize for that confusion. I am an engineer as well. I didn’t want to go into way to many details to obscure the general question.
I’m bugged by the white dwarf density because if you were to take a ball of iron the size of earth and put it in the void, it would have the mass and gravity roughly that of earth. But a white dwarf is enormously more dense with roughly the same composition. (Edit) I am aware that the mass of the white dwarf is the result of though sands of times the earth’s mass in iron, compressed down by it’s own gravity to give its volume roughly that of earth.
Is that density of the iron from the white dwarf stable outside the influence of gravity if you were to scoop a piece out with a magic spoon?
With the amount of mass you’re talking about all the spaces between molecules get filled in, at extreme levels even the spaces WITHIN molecules get crushed to nothing.
White dwarfs - from wiki:
Such densities are possible because white dwarf material is not composed of atoms joined by chemical bonds, but rather consists of a plasma of unbound nuclei and electrons. There is therefore no obstacle to placing nuclei closer than normally allowed by electron orbitals limited by normal matter.[22] Eddington wondered what would happen when this plasma cooled and the energy to keep the atoms ionized was no longer sufficient.[38] This paradox was resolved by R. H. Fowler in 1926 by an application of the newly devised quantum mechanics. Since electrons obey the Pauli exclusion principle, no two electrons can occupy the same state, and they must obey Fermi–Dirac statistics, also introduced in 1926 to determine the statistical distribution of particles which satisfy the Pauli exclusion principle.[39] At zero temperature, therefore, electrons can not all occupy the lowest-energy, or ground , state; some of them would have to occupy higher-energy states, forming a band of lowest-available energy states, the Fermi sea . This state of the electrons, called degenerate , meant that a white dwarf could cool to zero temperature and still possess high energy.[38][40]
Even larger masses can form neutron stars that do not really have elements at all - they are crushed together atomic nuclei with electrons floating through the lattice (according to wiki) - what we see on Earth as “normal state” is nothing like what they are -
Proceeding inward, one encounters nuclei with ever-increasing numbers of neutrons; such nuclei would decay quickly on Earth, but are kept stable by tremendous pressures. As this process continues at increasing depths, the neutron drip becomes overwhelming, and the concentration of free neutrons increases rapidly. In that region, there are nuclei, free electrons, and free neutrons. The nuclei become increasingly small (gravity and pressure overwhelming the strong force) until the core is reached, by definition the point where mostly neutrons exist. The expected hierarchy of phases of nuclear matter in the inner crust has been characterized as “nuclear pasta”, with fewer voids and larger structures towards higher pressures.[50] The composition of the superdense matter in the core remains uncertain. One model describes the core as superfluidneutron-degenerate matter (mostly neutrons, with some protons and electrons).
i havent worked on physics in some 15-20 years so i will just theorize (so may be completely wrong).
i would say not cause only thing that kept it so dense was ultra high gravity. when you remove force that kept it so ultra dense, material would either bounce to its natural density or explode cause of counter force.
