Though it seems daunting, moving our solar system is actually quite simple

Science Column: Stellar Engine Allows Movement Of Our Solar System

Our solar system is, as we know it, changing. Everything from the orbits of planets, to the collapse of the whole solar system. What if we wanted to escape certain death from another star colliding with our sun? Well the simple solution is to simply move it, but how would one go about moving an entire solar system. That is where the Stellar Engine comes into play.

All a stellar engine is, is a megastructure used to move a solar system by power of a star. It is actually really simple to move our solar system. Because the gravity of our sun is so powerful, wherever the sun goes, all of the other planets will follow suit. The reason this megastructure could be so important in the future because we would be able to control where our solar system is and avoid disasters, like gamma rays hitting the sun, or other stars coming into contact with our sun, and we would be able to explore the universe without truly leaving the confines of our home. There are two current methods that we could do right now to make this stellar engine possible.

The first method is a passive method of using our sun known as the Shkadov thruster. The Shkadov thruster is basically a giant mirror. It would work on the same principle of a rocket, the photons act like solar radiation and create momentum, not a lot but enough. You can see like an astronaut turning on a flashlight in space, it would push the astronaut backward extremely slowly. The Shkadov thruster would work like this except we would be using the sun, which produces a lot of photons. The basic idea is to put a giant mirror around the sun to focus the energy that comes from the sun away to create thrust. The shape of our mirror matters, we do not want to put the sun in an in-closed shape because the photons

would redirect back into the sun and that would cause the sun to heat up to an unimaginable amount resulting in a supernova explosion. A parabola would be a more viable option, because this shape would direct the photons behind the sun and create thrust to move our sun. The position of the Shkadov thruster is important as well, we do not want to put it on the side of the sun because that would subject planets, including earth, to the extreme protons that the thruster would be producing. The place to put the thruster is over the sun’s poles. This would allow us to vertically move throughout our solar neighborhood. However, this method limits our freedom of movement to one single direction, but if something were to come up in our solar neighborhood than this would be a very simple and viable solution to escape the destruction of our planet, or solar system. This option is time consuming and may not be fast enough to dodge a deadly supernova.

The second stellar engine design is called the Caplan Thruster. The caplan thruster is like a giant rocket that would push our solar system in any direction we would want. The thruster would use electromagnetic waves to collect hydrogen and helium from the sun’s solar wind into the engine to create nuclear fusion, which in turn, creates thrust. The solar wind alone is not enough to create the power and this is where another large megastructure comes in, the Dyson Sphere. The dyson sphere would pull energy from the sun and then refocus the energy it collects back into a certain point near our thruster and this would heat up a section of the sun to extreme temperatures that our caplan thruster will collect for fuel. The helium is burned inside of nuclear fusion reactors. The helium is now radioactive and is burning at nearly a billion degrees and becomes our primary source of propulsion. However, we don’t want our thruster flying into the side of the sun so we take the hydrogen we collected from the sun in our thruster and put it into a particle accelerator and shoot a beam back into the sun balancing our megastructure. With the Caplan Thruster, in as little as a million years, it can move our solar system by 50 light years avoiding possible catastrophic disasters. The megastructure would be an immense positive to our sun because lower mass stars burn slower than larger mass stars. In just 10 million

The stellar engine is a megastructure not just a species that is looking a few decades in the future, but billions of years in the future. The stellar engine would be able to give us galactic freedom without leaving the confines of our solar system. We would be able to explore the universe as a planet, not just a country. We would not only advance society, but we would be able to learn more about our planet by exploring and understanding other planets and extend our planet’s life.