As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: "I think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfully close to the surface of that thing!"
The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcot made swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establish them in an orbit that would be fairly safe.
It seemed like an eternity—five and a half gravities of acceleration held the men in their chairs almost as well as the straps of the antiacceleration units that bound them. When a man weighs better than half a ton, he doesn't feel like moving much.
Fuller whispered to Morey out of the corner of his sagging mouth. "What on Earth—I mean, what in Space is that thing? We're within only a few hundred miles, you said, so it must be pretty small. How could it pull us around like this?"
"It's a dead white dwarf—a 'black dwarf', you might say," Morey replied. "As the density of such matter increases, the volume of the star depends less and less on its temperature. In a dwarf with the mass of the sun, the temperature effect is negligible; it's the action of the forces within the electron-nucleon gas which makes up the star that reigns supreme.
"It's been shown that if a white dwarf—or a black one—is increased in mass, it begins to decrease sharply in volume after a certain point is reached. In fact, no cold star can exist with a volume greater than about one and a half times the mass of the sun—as the mass increases and the pressure goes up, the star shrinks in volume because of the degenerate matter in it. At a little better than 1.4 times the mass of the sun—our sun, I mean: Old Sol—the star would theoretically collapse to a point.
"That has almost happened in this case. The actual limit is when the star has reached the density of a neutron, and this star hasn't collapsed that far by a long shot.
"But that star is only forty kilometers—or less than twenty-five miles in diameter!"
It took nearly two hours of careful juggling to get an orbit which Arcot considered reasonably circular.
And when they finally did, Wade looked at the sky above them and shouted: "Say, look! What are all those streaks?"