“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, starting with the sad attempt to scoop some of that star candy up. Even though white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest one is still 8.6 light-years away, which is roughly 81,360,544,300 kilometers. So assuming you’ve got a light-speed spaceship, a bunch of books and videos to keep you amused for 8.6 years and that the heat and radiation emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach you might be able to get somewhere. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.” (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)
Now that you have your super volatile sample and have somehow removed it from the superdense, high-pressure star; you got the problem of containing it on Earth’s low-pressure environment, which would cause it to explode if not encapsulated properly. Let’s just say it didn’t blow up or vaporize your entire being, since the teaspoon sample temperature would range about 5538˚ and 55538 C˚- and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, it’d be pretty damn hard to feed yourself: A single teaspoon weighing in excess of five tons!
“You’d pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth,” Hammergren says. “The good news is that it’s not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out.”Ouch. If you observed your friend doing all of this and still wanted a taste for yourself, but don’t want to travel the 8.5 light-years or die, you can always open your fridge since it’s full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything we see around us were formed in the cores of stars. We fall in love, play with, eat and live on star poop.
