Star-Killing: Difference between revisions

* A novel by Barrington J. Bayley included a weapon which worked by eliminating all of the electrons in a star, thereby rendering fusion impossible. A star hit by the weapon would lose 1/1400 of its mass and instantly go out.

* The [[Star Trek Expanded Universe]] novel trilogy ''The Q Continuum'' suggests the supernova that destroyed the homeworld of the Tkon Empire (as seen in the ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|TNG]]'' episode "The Last Outpost") was caused by an omnipotent being that Q unleashed. This would answer the question of why a technologically advanced civilization with the power to move entire star systems could have been taken by surprise by a supernova.

* An appendix to Iain M. Banks' ''[[The Culture/Consider Phlebas|Consider Phlebas]]'' summarises the vast interstellar war the novel was set in, with a casual mention that among the tally of destruction was six stars. In a later book, we learn that one of them harboured an inhabited planet.

* The titular "iron-bombing" of Moscow's star in ''[[The Eschaton Series|Iron Sunrise]]'' by [[Charles Stross]]. Not an "iron bomb" [[Air-Launched Weapons|in the USAF sense of the word]], the process involves sending the target star's core into a [[Pocket Dimension]] [[Year Inside, Hour Outside|with a vastly accelerated time flow]]. [[Time Abyss|As quintillions of years pass in the mini-universe]], the superheated hydrogen cools and [[Quantum Mechanics Can Do Anything|eventually transmutes through quantum tunneling into a solid iron crystal]]. When the now-shrunken core is returned to the center of the star, the outer layers fall toward it, bounce off (iron doesn't like to be fused) and rebound explosively. The entire process [[Shown Their Work|is a fair approximation of what actually occurs in a Type II supernova]] (apart from the pocket dimension, anyway).