To survive in orbit around a WD is not a remarkable achievement - you just carry on orbiting forever (roughly). Orbiting a red giant would be pretty interesting, though - the RG has an indistinct surface, its diameter and luminosity varies, and it emits a lot of material as wind.
To survive in orbit around a neutron star would be another thing again. Neutron stars have intense magnetic fields, and spin rather quickly, resulting in a rotating field that is wrapped around on itself. That in effect creates a particle accelerator, driving electron flows (the electrons were all expelled when the NS collapsed) with extreme energies.
Short of hanging around near an exploding supernova, I can't imagine a more hostile environment.
I wonder what the band of survival is, where the planet doesn’t get turned to Swiss cheese first.
Yes, I get the "induction motor" idea. With fields and voltages that intense, I guess just about anything becomes conductive.
[Edit] I don't know whether those field strengths are consistent with atoms continuing to be atoms - I guess there must be some range beyond which a thing like a planet could maintain its integrity. But (guessing wildly) I would expect there to be a region around a neutron star within which it is impossible for atoms to exist.
I’ve always found this idea neat.
This sounds interesting, how would such a method of power generation work?
You may also enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-O-Qdh7VvQ which is a minutephysics on black hole power using much the same principles but attaining yet higher efficiencies.
PS: Dyson Spheres is misnomer, Olaf Stapledon should be credited for this idea (Star Maker 1937)
The result may not be literally a rigid sphere as people think of it, but if the orbits are packed tightly together enough it'll look plenty "sphere-like" from the next star system over.
A rigid Dyson sphere is probably impossible, and its utility is not entirely clear. Making a Dyson swarm around a star is merely a lot of work, and also has the advantage of immediately paying benefits as soon as the very first satellite is launched.
Collisions between orbital junk are most likely to happen between objects in the same orbit. And most junk is in some roughly equatorial orbit. So I'd expect the resulting debris to end up in roughly the same orbit, so that the debris would form a sort of fuzzy disk - not a sphere. I wouldn't expect to observe much debris over the North Pole.
In modern usage, "damping" usually refers to a drag or parasitic affect in some oscillatory system, but it does not have to be oscillatory. It can be other drag effects that convert energy, with a usual assumption that it will bring the system to a new equilibrium. An object falling through the atmosphere can be considered to have its fall dampened by the air drag, converging towards its terminal velocity.
I am not familiar with all the physics involved in falling towards/into such a star, so I do not know if there are field effects which would cause damping of the fall prior to impact of the trash with an actual surface, similar to the atmospheric descent towards earth. I also wonder if they imagine the orbital system is being damped to allow the trash to impact the star, by bleeding off tangential velocity to decay the orbit.
The universe is young, a lot of stuff hasn't happened yet. It wouldn't be surprising if we are about the earliest life of this sort that could exist.
At least, I can understand visualize the time scale of the universe a lot better than I can visual the length scale. Speed of light doesn't feel like 1/1 to humans!
Alternatively, map all the white dwarves, then wait long enough, then look again..
A WD will slowly cool to a BD over Trillions of years, so it's all linear. Funnily enough, they are probably every shade of red/brown in-between - but "brown dwarves" are usually reserved for objects that never where "proper" hydrogen-fusing stars, but are large enough to fuse deuterium.
A fully black dwarf would be so cold it would be indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation, but that's going to take at least a trillion times longer than the current age of the universe. Not just slightly longer.
Possibly through gravitational interactions with non-dwarf stars in the same system.
There not being any yet makes either method somewhat more challenging.
I think I'd expect a charger to restore a phone to something like its as-new functionality. I've never heard of any mechanism that could change a white dwarf into not a white dwarf, other than extreme age, or being merged with another object.
That heat dissipates so slowly that (AIUI) no white dwarf in the universe has yet had time to cool down enough to stop radiating (i.e. the universe does not yet contain any black dwarves).
So a star that is in the process of collapsing into a white dwarf could reasonably be said to be "dying". Once it's collapsed, it's dead.