Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-60.240.118.7-20150105090527/@comment-1298029-20150521133018

Just about the forging: The MCU says Mjolnir was "forged in the heart of a dying star". First, I think the star was used as a furnace, rather than a material source. Mjolnir appears to be made of metal, but the two types of star whose end-cycle stages seem amenable to forging of any sort to be done at their cores, white and red dwarf stars, do not have metallic cores. White dwarves have carbon-oxygen cores with density at the level of electron-degenerate matter (about a million times the density of the average metal, unlikely to be useable in any sort of industrial process), while red dwarves have gaseous cores made of a hydrogen-helium mixture, like most stars.

While white dwarves do not seem to be a suitable environment for forging anything, the surface temperature of a red dwarf is in the range of 2,000 -- 4,000 K (deg. Kelvin, = deg. Celsius + 273.15; stated range =~ 3,000 -- 7,000 F). The core temperature of any star running fusion reactions (which includes red dwarfs) is in excess of a million Kelvin (million Celsius, 1.8 million F; white dwarfs do not run normal fusion, but their cores are about 10 times hotter still, due to pressure effects) and thus useless for metalworking (metals at this temperature are a hot ionized gas, like any other element would be), suggesting that forging could have been done somewhere around a star's surface. Why they didn't just use an industrial furnace, which can comfortably reach several thousand Kelvin even if it's not particularly large or modern, is beyond me. :)

Just for completeness, the other possibilities for a star to end its life-cycle are even more extreme than red and white dwarves. They include:


 * nova: the star "explodes". What is left is usually a red, brown, or white dwarf. Also called "supernova" when the star (thus, the explosion) is large.


 * partial core collapse: leads to white dwarf or neutron star (possibly also a quark star, although that is at present theoretical)


 * complete core collapse: leads to a black hole. Black holes suck (heh heh).


 * brown dwarf: here only for completeness; this is an object halfway between a large gas giant planet (like Jupiter, but larger) and a red dwarf star. They are too cold in their cores to run fusion like normal stars, and their surfaces are at most 2,000 Kelvin in temperature. This is not enough to reliably forge many harder metals.