On 24 Feb 2016 at 10:13, Greg Chalik wrote:

> Well, we do observe a lot of star 'deaths', and I would guess that
> with those come planetary 'deaths' also, includin gthose with
> atmospheres, and even oxygen atmospheres. These atmospheres, and
> their oceans, would turn to ice when systems fail, so there would be
> quite a bit of debris of such cataclysms out there.

Yeah, but those are novas, and supernovas. They won't leave a lot of
usable debris.

> And by the by, recovery of such ice would also offer the added
> dubious 'benefit' of finding weird and wonderful examples of
> long-extinct lifeforms from dead worlds. Maybe even sapiens. Maybe
> even preserved enough to regenerate? Such a find would potentially
> constitute property, so the PCs could come into pocession of an
> entire species or dozen.
>
> Could even find all sorts of 'junk' in such an ice field from a
> long-destroyed civilisation that 3I scientists and engineers may give
> their right arm for.

Not sure quite how bad novas get, but we now know that they occure in
binary systems with a white dwarf or neutron star closely orbiting a
more normal star.

They have to orbit closely enough for mass exchange to take place.
Eventually the hydrogen and whatnot builds up thickly enough that the
compression of gravity will trigger a fusion reaction.

If it's a slow buuldup, the nova can occur again and again. Not the
safest sort of system to hang around in. also, the fact that there
*is* a white dwarf, much less a neutron star means that something
rather catastrophic happened in the past.

So don't expect to find anything useful.

If the transferred mass builds up too fast, it can trigger a
supernova and take out the entire white dwarf or neutron star.

In that case regular planets in the habitable would be gone, or at
best only part of the core would be left.

Gas giants would get struipped down to their cores.

Again, nothing very usefuil left.

Certainly no relics of any civilization.

"Regular" supernovas (when a sufficiently massive star runs out of
things to fuse) only happen to stars massive enough that they won't
stay on the main sequence long enough for life to evolve.

Stars of low enough mass that they'll not go supernova and likeluy
stay on the main sequence long enough for life to evolve will become
red giants after they run out of hydrogen in the core.

That's not the sort of star "death" we see (mostly because it takes
longer than we've had astronomy).

And the star expanding is more likely to boil off volatiles than
freeze a formerly habitable planet.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com