Rogue Rings

[Drashner1]

Apropos of nearly nothing, has anyone thought seriously about whether something like a 'grazer' could harvest material from a neutron star?  Could such a thing exist?

'Neutrons' aren't atoms, strictly speaking; liberated from the context of a neutron star, they'd do some pretty energetic things on the way to a renewed existence as baryonic matter.  

I ask because of the transmutation question raised earlier w/r/t stellar grazers, where Hydrogen and (especially) Helium aren't particularly useful as construction materials.  Neutrons lack an atomic number altogether. I don't even know what forces would govern the choice of what elements they eventually become as baryonic matter.

In principle, yes a grazer could take a neutron star apart if the grazer itself were sufficiently massive so that it could:

a) Get close to the star without itself being destabilized due to asymptotic flatness requirements. IIRC a mass as little as 1% of the wormhole mass can destabilize it, although I don't recall if we explicitly say that Y11k stabilization tech can overcome that limit or not. If not, then the grazer would need to be well over 100x as massive as the neutron star. Note however, that this same thing applies to any star a grazer is being used to take apart - either the archai need to be good enough at stabilizing it to let it come into proximity to more than 1% of its mass or the grazer (actually the 'entrance' mouth) must be many many times more massive than the star. If that works out to 80 or 95x more massive than the star, that's certainly a big improvement - but it's still a huge amount of mass energy. Although you can - in principle - extract it and shrink the overall grazer in the process, perhaps converting the energy into something else while your at it. Maybe amat - which you could then throw thru a Q-mirror and convert to regular matter. Hmm.

b) Tear the neutron star apart against it's own gravity.

As far as what you might get out of neutrons or H2 and He - The internal tidal forces of the grazer are huge - but I don't recall us ever nailing down how huge. But at the least anything passing through will likely be reduced to sub-atomic particles and maybe down to the constituent quarks and whatnot. If the latter - and since we're talking at least S5 godtech to make this thing - it might be doable for the archailect to manipulate the resulting plasma such that it reconstitutes back into heavier elements in whatever proportions are desired. At least I can't think of any reason why you couldn't do that unless there's something in symmetry or conservation laws that would impose limits of some kind.

Worst case scenario you can get it all back as H2 and then have to run it through a bunch of DWIZ to convert it to heavier elements.

Hope this helps,

Todd