Vulcanoids and Iron Stars

My fellow fans of weird astronomy will have no doubt heard tell of the planet Vulcan.

No, I mean the theoretical planet in our own solar system, disproven by Albert Einstein, which was supposed to orbit the sun at an even closer distance than Mercury.

In the years since we lost Vulcan, however, scientists have been kicking the math around.  And what they've come up with is a zone around the sun, but within Mercury's orbit, where there ought to be some asteroids.

Did I say "asteroids?"  I'm sorry, I mean of course VULCANOIDS!

Now, there's any number of reasons why there might not be any such thing (being so small and so close to the sun, vulcanoids would be almost impossible to spot).  Sure, the math says they could and even SHOULD be there, but they might have fallen into the sun billions of years ago if stray comets dragged them off course, they might have been sucked away by some runaway gas giant's gravitational pull as it escaped the solar system, or they might simply have been burned off for fuel by the merciless Hath'gaar Overlords during the Extrasolar Invasion of 535,511 B.C.

But maybe they're there right now!  Doesn't it make our world just a little more exciting?  Just think!  As the sun arcs overhead today, it might have its own almost Saturn-like ring of rocks, invisibly spinning around it.

Vulcanoids!  Right in our own backyard.  Fun, right?

I knew you'd think so.

The other bit of theoretical astronomy I want to share with you today is the concept of Iron Stars.

So, out of the various types of stars you hear bandied about (red giants, blue dwarfs, etc.) there are some that, like our friends the vulcanoids, are based on speculation and theory, and not just because they're hard to see.  Some remain purely theoretical because there hasn't been enough time since the universe began for them to develop.

For example, most stars in our galaxy, including the sun, will eventually collapse into white dwarfs, which, in time, will burn out and cool into black dwarfs.  However, since it takes so long for a white dwarf to cool down, there can be no black dwarfs, anywhere.  Not yet.

Some scientists have taken this even further.  What if the universe isn't going to collapse back into a singularity?  What if it will keep going, forever?  What then?

Well, eventually, after so much time has past that the history of the universe so far is hardly even a blip, you should get some interesting effects...  For example, those black dwarfs will have gradually turned into planet-sized iron balls, via cold fusion.  This may not happen...  No one knows whether all the protons in the universe will break down into (for all practical purposes) nothingness by this stage!  But if they don't, the remains of our sun should very, very gradually turn into a cold, iron ball.

I really don't have anything funny to say about Iron Stars...  I just think it's an amazing concept.  Don't you?

Oh.  Sorry.