Starquake.pdf

Prelude
Burrowing through the dark void between the Sun and its stellar neighbors, a tiny visitor came to the
Solar System—a rapidly spinning, white-hot, ultra-dense neutron star. A super-strong magnetic field
impaled the star from east to west. Reaching out from the rotating star, the two whirling arms of magnetic
force whipped at the random atoms floating in space until they were moving at nearly the speed of light.
The shocked atoms gave off a pulsating beam of powerful radio waves. Thus, even though the tiny
neutron star was too small to be seen in the sky by the naked eye, it had been detected by radio
telescopes on Earth long before it arrived at the Solar System.
The neutron star was given the name "Dragon's Egg." When it was first detected, its position in the sky
was at the end of the constellation Draco, as if the dragon had left an egg behind in its nest.
The discovery of magnetic monopoles had revolutionized fusion-rocket technology, so it wasn't long
before the first "interstellar" expedition reached the star, only some 2120 AU from Earth. Riding in the
interstellar spacecraft St. George, the exploration crew approached the visitor carefully, for a neutron star
can be dangerous if approached too closely without taking proper precautions.
Although Dragon's Egg was only 20 kilometers in diameter, the surface gravity was 67 billion times Earth
gravity, the 8200 K temperature was hotter than the Sun, and the trillion-gauss magnetic field threading
through the star at the "East" and "West" magnetic "Poles" was so strong it could elongate a
normally round atomic nucleus into a cigar shape. Since Dragon's Egg was spinning at slightly more than
five revolutions per second, the rapidly moving magnetic fields emanating from the East and West Poles
would cook any humans who approached the star too closely without protection.
To counteract the gravity and the rotating magnetic fields, the scientists on St. George placed Dragon
Slayer, their small science capsule, in a 406 kilometer synchronous orbit about the star, where the
extreme gravity was canceled by the centrifugal force. Here also, Dragon Slayer would be moving along
with the magnetic field and at 406 kilometers distance the magnetic field was no longer dangerous, just a
nuisance.
Although the orbital motion of Dragon Slayer canceled the gravity at the center of the spacecraft, the
match was not perfect everywhere. The residual gravity tides of 200 gravities per meter were still
dangerous, but the exploration scientists devised a solution for that problem. They looped a
superconducting cable a million kilometers long around the neutron star. The cable was used to extract
electrical energy from the star's rotating magnetic field. The electrical currents in the cable powered a
robotic factory that produced magnetic monopoles. The monopoles were injected into eight of the many
asteroids that had been collected by the neutron star during its journey through space. There were two