Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-60.240.118.7-20150105090527/@comment-1298029-20150522223056

71.104.252.230 wrote: @Misacek

I do apologize if anything I said came across as rude, that wasn't my intent. No, not at all, your reply's fine. :)

I do realize that "forged in the heart of a dying star" is much more poetic than "forged in the heart of Arcelor-Mittal plant #21". :)

And I get that this is no hard-SF, that they don't really have to keep their science too realistic. I'm quite willing to take various made-up technology at face value, but I still prefer for it to be fantastical in such a way that cannot be shown to be scientifically impossible or ridiculous with current real-world scientific knowledge. It may be a subtle difference, but I find I'm rather sensitive to it. :)

As for the star-forging, most elemental metals suitable for toolmaking melt at temperatures from around 1,000 -- 4,000 Kelvin, which is well within the range of modern human foundry equipment. If you ignore Starlite (google it, all indications are it was a hoax, or rather, a publicity stunt), the material with the highest melting point temperature (at standard pressure) known to man is the inorganic compound tantalum hafnium carbide, which by all indications melts at about 4,500 K (it was never industrially produced, and has no current applications outside the lab), although it's not a metal and probably doesn't have the mechanical properties required for tools.

I suppose it's possible that there are materials with significantly higher melting points (although there are physical reasons for why melting points much higher than those we already know of are unlikely, namely the possible strength and configuration of the electron bonds in molecules and lattice bonds in elemental materials), and there are limits to what an industrial furnace can do (unless you use absurd pressures to lower the melting points / increase the heat, and even that has limits with the construction materials available to present-day humanity that the furnace can be made of). Stars, on the other hand, feature a wide range of temperatures, from the relatively cool surface (about 5,800 K for our Sun, ranges ca. 2,000 K -- 60,000 K for the various classes of active stars), to million-Kelvin-range temperatures in the corona, to tens of million Kelvin (as well as absurd pressures; e.g. the Sun's core has some 250 billion times Earth's sea-level atmospheric pressure) in the nuclei-fusing core.

Also, I suppose it's possible that the stellar environment is needed for different reasons than temperature; for example, ionization. The interior and close vicinity of an active star are flooded with very high levels of broad-spectrum electromagnetic radiation, as well as alpha and beta rays in some cases. It's conceivable that some exotic materials unknown to man require an environment of intense irradiation to be created. Furthermore, most stars are very massive and/or very dense and therefore have very high surface gravity; for example, Sol (our sun) has a "surface" (inasmuch as a star has a well-defined surface) gravity of about 28g (28 times Earth surface gravity; next in the Solar System is Jupiter, at ~2.5g, and the rest of the major planets and moons is close to or below 1g). A high-gravity environment might also conceivably be needed for some chemical or physical processes used in advanced alien manufacturing, and artificial gravity technology may have been impractical for or unavailable to Mjolnir's creators.

So, there. It's a regular fan retcon, for sure, but at least it shows that there might be legitimate reasons for one why would forge something inside stars.