} Do you recall the ending of Arthur C. Clarke’s movie 2010? Before the aston- "ished eyes of a group of American and | Soviet astronauts, mysterious and god- \'like extraterrestrials implode Jupiter, turning it into an artificial star. This spectacular feat was not merely to ‘‘im- "press the natives”’—although it did, ' World War Three was prevented—but ‘was also intended as a first step to enable . ‘mankind to terraform Jupiter's Galilean satellites. I don’t know about you, but I left the cinema disappointed. I couldn’t see how Clarke’s method of stellifying Jupiter " could possibly work. What I wanted to ~ know was if Clarke was merely pulling ‘a cosmic rabbit out of a very large hat, or whether there was actually some sci- entific rationale (however nebulous) for : the ending of the movie. So I wrote to - him, only to hear by return that Arthur cannot now recall what was going through his mind when he wrote 20/0’s genesis. Obviously, there was magic involved, of the type referred to in Clarke’s Third Law: ‘‘Any sufficiently Martyn J. Fogg STELLIFYING JUPITER You've read many items about terraforming—here’s something a bit different. advanced technology is indistinguisha- ble from magic.”’ I was unsatisfied, even more so in fact as I had just finished reading Vernor Vinge’s superb Marooned in Realtime. I enjoyed chapter eighteen; it was one of the most spectacular fictional views of the future I have ever read. I found one quote particularly inspir- ing: ‘‘Such a fine idea it was. Our par- ent company liked big construction projects. Originally, they wanted to stellate Jupiter, but couldn't buy the neccessary options.” Stellifying Jupiter—what a thought! But need we neccessarily invoke magic or “‘superscience’’? The question I asked myself was, ‘‘Is there any feasible scen- ario for stellifying Jupiter permitted by modern astrophysics?’ Is Implosion an Option? Before we start tampering with Jupiter, we should first ask ourselves how far away is Jupiter from being 2 star in its own right? Most astrophysicists are of the opinion that a star must be aboveabout 8% of a solar mass for conditions in its core to be right for sustained ther- monuclear fusion reactions. Below this mass we have “brown dwarfs,’’ stars that burn deuterium, and other light cle- ments such as lithium, to exhaustion as they contract and thereafter cool to near invisibility. No solitary brown dwarfs have yet been discovered and it is thought in any case that there is a lower mass limit to the formation of these hy- pothetical objects of about 2% of a solar mass. Jupiter is only a thousandth the mass of the Sun and so clearly is no- where near being stellar. Any attempt to ignite Jupiter without substantially altering its physical parameters would doubtless fizzle out. The collapse of a portion of Jupiter to enormous density is the alteration in Jovian physical parameters that Clarke appeared to be relying on at the end of 2010. One of his astronauts speculates that Jupiter might even have been com- pressed to the density of neutron matter (about a thousand trillion grams per cu- bic centimter), in effect turning the planet into a low mass neutron star. How would this new star shine? Well, for a start, the collapse itself would re- lease enormous quantities of gravita- tional potential energy. This would greatly heat the infalling matter, prob- ably too much for comfort—an uncon- trolled collapse would be the equivalent of setting off a miniature supernova in “the middle of the Solar System! If this problem could be overcome, then one might imagine the final configuration of Jupiter as a central dense object sur- rounded by an accreting shell or disc of hydrogen. Whether thermonuclear re- actions in this shell would proceed smoothly or episodically is anyone’s guess. The collapse scenario has major prob- tems. It is almost impossible to envisage how the implosion of Jupiter might be achieved without resorting to magic. It also appears that the postulated end- product, a Jovian mass neutron star, would not be stable. Many SF readers are used to the concept of small, handy, chunks of neutron matter, as many SF authors love throwing the stuff about to achieve all sorts of spectacular effects. A grapefruit-sized chunk of it would weigh about half a trillion tons: no won- der it’s irresistible! However, the only bulk neutron matter we think may exist in nature is within neutron stars and the curious property of these stars is that shrinking them in mass results in an in- crease in their radius. In other words, low mass objects made from neutron matter are less dense than higher mass objects. This implies a minimum mass limit for objects made from neutron matter, below which gravitational compression is not sufficient to prevent neutron decay back into protons and electrons. Current models of neutron stars suggest that this limit is from, 3 to 18% of the mass of the Sun. Thus we can see straight away that Clarke’s den- sified Jupiter would probably ‘‘bounce’’ and re-expand. Thus, magic would also be needed to maintain Jupiter in ‘its re- quired ultradense state! Can we confidently say therefore that stellifying Jupiter looks at the’ present time to be totally impossible? Not nec-j essarily. An alternative way to stellify the planet may be to not collapse Ju- piter, but instead to introduce a col- lapsed object into its core. An Exotic Power Source for Jupiter | We are obviously now talking about a small black hole. How might this pro- vide the energy output to stellify Jupi- ter? A black hole is created by the collapse of an object to such a density that the intensity of its gravitational field pre- vents even photons from escaping its _ surface. By ‘‘surface’’ I refer to the event horizon: the boundary surround- _ ing the black hole, cutting it off from the rest of the Universe, where the es- cape velocity is equal to the speed of light. Normally, black holes are thought to be created by the collapse of massive stars. However, numerous small holes of sub-stellar mass may have come into existence in the first moments of the Universe—I’ll return to these later. Because black holes have such con- centrated gravity fields, they thus strongly attract any matter in their vicinity. As matter falls into the hole, gravitational potential energy is released, resulting in phenomenal heating and the produc- tion of an enormous flood of radiation. That’s the simple picture—but what size of hole would we need to stellify Jupiter and how might it behave inside a planet? To answer this we will have to look at accretion power in more detail, but not too much! The whole subject is im- mensely complex and still clouded in a great deal of uncertainty. A realistic study of black hole accretion must take into account, amongst other things, the temperature, density, angular momen- tum and composition of the infalling matter; the presence of magnetic fields; thermonuclear fusion of matter com- pressed close to the hole and both the hole’s rotation and its relative ‘motion with respect to the medium it is passing through. Scientists have considered ac- cretion onto black holes within a number of astrophysical contexts, but nobody, to my knowledge, has looked at intra- planetary black holes. This is hardly surprising, somebody would have to put a black hole inside a planet; this is not the sort of trick performed by nature! OK, it’s complicated, but let’s try to ease our speculation by looking first at three generic types of black hole accre- tion that have been modelled. 1) Spherically symmetric accretion. To simplify the problem, early studies of black hole accretion assumed infall- ing gas had no angular momentum with respect to the hole and that the hole was Stationary and non-rotating. Infall of matter would therefore be spherically symmetric. The closest to this idealized situation in nature would be an isolated black hole accreting from the interstellar medium. It turns out that this mode of accretion does not heat up the gas very well (in some models infalling gas ac- tually cools within a certain distance from the hole) and so it would not pro- duce very high luminosities. Estimates for the conversion of rest-mass energy to radiation in this case range from very low values to up to 2%. For comparison, thermonuclear fusion is about half a percent efficient, so that in most cases