Posted 11.12.2009 at 10:17 am
22 Comments
Light Meal A teaspoon of super-dense white dwarf star would rip through your stomach.
iStock
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Then you’d have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth’s relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn’t blow up in your face—or vaporize your face, since the stuff’s temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F—and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you’d be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. “You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”
It probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you’re desperate for a taste of star, you don’t really need to travel 8.6 light-years—your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?
Think you can stump us? Send your questions to fyi@popsci.com.
22 Comments
To comment, please Login.
Popular Tags
Technology
Download Our iPhone App
Stay up to date on the latest news of the future of science and technology from your iPhone with full articles, images and offline viewing
Follow Us On Twitter
Featuring every article from the magazine and website, plus links from around the Web. Also see our PopSci DIY feed
Become a Fan On Facebook
Share links with friends, comment on stories and more
December 2009: Best of What's New
In our December issue, Popular Science names the 100 best innovations of the year: bombproof wallpaper, self-parking cars, the fastest helicopter, and 97 more. Plus inventor profiles and videos.
Check out the best of what's new here.
Popular Science Photo Pool
Popular on Popsci
Most Viewed
Technology
- IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain
- Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020
- Batteryless Remote Control Pulls Power from Your Button Presses
- Video: The View From the Highest Man-Made Point on Earth
- Google's Replacement for HTTP Protocol to Make Web Browsing Twice as Fast
- High-Pressure Diamond Anvil Creates a New Solid from Xenon and Hydrogen
- The Dubai Airshow As Seen From Orbit
- So Do Prosthetic Limbs Give Sprinters an Advantage Or Not?
- Robotic Surrogate Takes Your Place at Work
- Boeing's Latest Mobile Laser Weapon Tracks and Shoots Down Drone
Most Commented
Technology
- Intel Wants Brain Implants in Its Customers' Heads by 2020
- IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer Models a Cat's Entire Brain
- CERN Successfully Brings Large Hadron Collider Back Online
- NASA Robotic Rocket Plane To Survey Martian Surface
- Army Corps of Engineers Now Required to Consider Climate Change in All Future Projects
- Video: The View From the Highest Man-Made Point on Earth
- Rat Brain Modelers Denounce IBM's Cat Brain Simulation as "Shameful and Unethical" Hoax
- So Do Prosthetic Limbs Give Sprinters an Advantage Or Not?
- Scientists Stun Nematode Worms With UV Phaser Straight Out Of Star Trek
- National Security Agency's Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015
Most Emailed
Technology
- High-Pressure Diamond Anvil Creates a New Solid from Xenon and Hydrogen
- Mourning the Death of the Meta Media Experience
- Decoded Corn Genome Promises Higher Yields, Better Biofuels, New Plastics
- Everything You Need To Know About Chrome OS
- Roboticists Want to Make You an Electric Car Customized for Your Personal Commute
- "Time Traveling" Web Browser Let's You Search Like It's 1999
- Video: The View From the Highest Man-Made Point on Earth
- Smart Armor Knows Its Own Strength, As Well As The Enemy's
- Sea Lions Help U.S. Navy Handcuff Enemy Divers and Sweep Mines
- A.I. Anchors Replace Human Reporters In Newsroom of the Future
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2009 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
yall are ignorant. a white dwarf star could not be eat, better yet held in a spoon. come back to me with a better question. and also it weight tons.
What is more racist a white dwarf or a brown dwarf?
"yall are ignorant. a white dwarf star could not be eat, better yet held in a spoon. come back to me with a better question. and also it weight tons."
What if you're spoon is made of neutron star?
then that would be an awsome spoon and i would use it for everything
It tastes like chicken
What tha...
NOO it tastes like cantalope ! ! !
no way would it taste like cantaloupe or any other melon. it would taste like a dinosaur- shaped watermelon-flavored vitamin. p.s. what about a 1,000,000,000,000th of a singularity? would that pull you apart?
lolz :P
Did any of the tea partiers get some of it? You shd ask them.
Really? Is there really a need for pap like this? Is someone actually considering eating a white dwarf? If so, alert the Obama administration to create an impact report and develop a federally approved process to consume a white dwarf and possible side effects. Of course, the appropriate labelling would need to be applied to the star first. Conncentrate on real scientific articles that could actually affect us.
Must have been a slow news day.
from coral gables, fl
Don't hate.
Just because this article doesn't necessarily have even the slightest hint of reality involved, its still a valuable thought experiment, a nice exercise in imagination (which we do seem to be lacking). Hey its not gonna win any awards, but if it gets people thinking about things they don't normally thing about, in ways they don't normally think, that is a reward enough.
I think wolverine could eat a white dwarf. His healing powers would fix him up.
Doubtful, he would first have to crap it out, and thinking about that, his adamantium on his bones (who came up with that?), which came from space (I saw the movie, I'm not a geek), could have been a certain metal that reacted with neutron star to create the very dense metal you now have (god thats a mouthful), just hypothesizing that any of that was real of course (BTW that was very imaginative). Oh and I don't think he can heal the adamantium that was sucked from his skeleton
PS. I might be a little of a geek.
WOWOWOWOWO.don't you want a alone and rich women to make a appointment with you?there is
a convenient way "Matchcougar.com"to make you meet some rich women
you just enter ======Matchcougar.com=====,and it is OK.BE FREE
hey, can I get a cuppla those for fog lights?
I think most people are trying to avoid foods that are too heavy anyway. A nice hydrogen nebula salad would go down a lot better.
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley
Dumb!
Can I have some Pixie dust with that!
RT
www.online-privacy.at.tc
Sooooo... what is a dwarf star compared to a black hole? Please answer.
Astounded
11/14/09 at 9:26 am
"Really? Is there really a need for pap like this? Is someone actually considering eating a white dwarf? If so, alert the Obama administration to create an impact report and develop a federally approved process to consume a white dwarf and possible side effects. Of course, the appropriate labelling would need to be applied to the star first. Conncentrate on real scientific articles that could actually affect us.
Must have been a slow news day."
Astounded,
I am your name-ed that you see little value in this thought exercise. Scientific discovery is often enhanced when the scientist considers solutions to a given problem
even if it might appear, at first glance, ridiculous. This is the very definition of 'thinking outside the box'.
The question was directed to PS readers, many of whom have little scientific training if any at all. You and I might have known at first glance that the question posed an impossible scenario. We are the minority.
Which white dwarf star are we talking about? Taking a bite out of Danny DeVito makes my stomach turn.