When I was little, there was always that one kid on the playground who thought he was clever. We’d be drawing horrifying killer monsters (we were a weird bunch). I would say “My monster is a thousand feet high!” Then Chad would say “My monster is a mile high!” Then I would say “Nuh-uh, my monster is a thousand miles high!” Then Taylor would break in, filling us with dread, because we knew what he was going to say: “My monster is infinity miles high!” There would then follow the inevitable numeric arms race. “My monster is infinity plus one miles high!” “My monster is infinity plus infinity miles high!” “My monster is infinity times infinity miles high!” Our shortsighted teachers hadn’t taught us about Georg Cantor, or else we would have known that, once you hit infinity, pretty much all the math you do just gives you infinity right back.

But that’s not what I’m getting at here. As we got older and started (unfortunately) to care about money, the concept of “infinite money” inevitably started coming up. As I got older still and descended fully into madness, I realized that having an infinite amount of printed money was a really bad idea, since an infinite amount of mass would cause the entire universe to collapse into a singularity, which would limit the number of places I could spend all that money. Eventually, my thoughts of infinite wealth matured, and I realized that what you really want is a machine that can generate however much money you want in an instant. With nanomachines, you could conceivably assemble dollar bills (or coins) with relative ease. As long as you didn’t create so much money that you got caught or crashed the economy, you could live really well for the rest of your life.

But that’s not what I got hung up on. I got hung up on the part where I collapsed the universe into a Planck-scale singularity. And that got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects: weird objects in space. I’ve been mildly obsessed with creating larger and larger piles of objects ever since. Yes, I do know that I’m weird. Thanks for pointing that out.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to combine these two things, and try to figure out the largest pile of money I could reasonably accumulate. My initial thought was to make the pile from American Gold Eagle coins, but I like to think of myself as a man of the world, and besides, those Gold Eagles are annoyingly alloyed with shit like copper and silver, and I like it when things are pure. So, instead, I’m going to invent my own currency: the Hobo Sullivan Dragon’s Egg Gold Piece. It’s a sphere of 24-karat gold with a diameter of 50 millimeters, a mass of 1,260 grams, and a value (as of June 29, 2014) of $53,280. The Dragon’s Egg bears no markings or portraits, because when your smallest unit of currency is worth $53,280, you can do whatever the fuck you want. And you know what? I’m going to act like a dragon and pile my gold up in a gigantic hoard. But I don’t want any arm-removing Anglo Saxon kings or tricksy hobbitses or anything coming and taking any of it, so instead of putting it in a cave under a famous mountain, I’m going to send it into space.

Now, a single Dragon’s Egg is already valuable enough for a family to live comfortably on for a year, or for a single person to live really comfortably. But I’m apparently some kind of ridiculous royalty now, so I want to live better than comfortably. As Dr. Evil once said, I want one billion dollars. That means assembling 18,769 Dragon’s Eggs in my outer-space hoard. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m less royalty and more some kind of psychotic space-dragon, which I think you’ll agree is infinitely cooler. 18,769 Dragon’s Eggs would weigh in at 23,649 kilograms. It would form a sphere with a diameter of about 1.46 meters, which is about the size of a person. Keen-eyed (or obsessive) readers will notice that this sphere’s density is significantly less than that of gold. That’s because, so far, the spheres are still spheres, and the closest possible packing, courtesy of Carl Friedrich Gauss, is only 74% sphere and 26% empty space.

You know what? Since I’m being a psychotic space-dragon anyway, I think I want a whole golden planet. Something I can walk around while I cackle. A nice place to take stolen damsels and awe them with shining gold landscapes.

Well, a billion dollars’ worth of Dragon’s Eggs isn’t going to cut it. The sphere’s surface gravity is a pathetic 2.96 microns per second squared. I’m fascinated by gravity, and so I often find myself working out the surface gravity of objects like asteroids of different compositions. Asteroids have low masses and densities and therefore have very weak gravity. The asteroid 433 Eros, one of only a few asteroids to be visited and mapped in detail by a space probe (NEAR-Shoemaker), has a surface gravity of about 6 millimeters per second squared (This varies wildly because Eros is far from symmetrical. Like so many asteroids, it’s stubbornly and inconveniently peanut-shaped. There are places where the surface is very close to the center of mass, and other places where it sticks way up away from it.) The usual analogies don’t really help you get a grasp of how feeble Erotian gravity is. The blue whale, the heaviest organism (living or extinct, as far as we know) masses around 100 metric tons. On Earth, it weighs 981,000 Newtons. You can also say that it weighs 100 metric tons, because there’s a direct and simple equivalence between mass and weight on Earth’s surface. Just be careful: physics dorks like me might try to make a fool out of you. Anyway, on Eros, a blue whale would weigh 600 Newtons, which, on Earth, would be equivalent to a mass of 61 kilograms, which is about the mass of a slender adult human.

But that’s really not all that intuitive. It’s been quite a while since I tried to lift 61 kilograms of anything. When I’m trying to get a feel for low gravities, I prefer to use the 10-second fall distance. That (not surprisingly) is the distance a dropped object would fall in 10 seconds under the object’s surface gravity. You can calculate this easily: (0.5) * (surface gravity) * (10 seconds)^2. I want you to participate in this thought experiment with me. Take a moment and either stare at a clock or count “One one thousand two one thousand three one thousand…” until you’ve counted off ten seconds. Do it. I’ll see you in the next paragraph.

In those ten seconds, a dropped object on Eros would fall 30 centimeters, or about a foot. For comparison, on Earth, that dropped object would have fallen 490 meters. If you neglect air resistance (let’s say you’re dropping an especially streamlined dart), it would have hit the ground after 10 seconds if you were standing at the top of the Eiffel Tower. You’d have to drop it from a very tall skyscraper (at least as tall as the Shanghai World Financial Center) for it to still be in the air after ten seconds.

But my shiny golden sphere pales in comparison even to Eros. Its 10-second fall distance is 148 microns. That’s the diameter of a human hair (not that I’d allow feeble humans on my golden dragon-planet). That’s ridiculous. Clearly, we need more gold.

Well, like Dr. Evil, we can increase our demand: 1 trillion US dollars. That comes out to 18,768,769 of my golden spheres. That’s 23,649,000 kilograms of gold. My hoard would have a diameter of 14.6 meters and a surface gravity of 29.6 microns per second squared (a 10-second fall distance of 1.345 millimeters, which would just barely be visible, if you were paying close attention.) I am not impressed. And you know what happens when a dragon is not impressed? He goes out and steals shit. So I’m going to go out and steal the entire world’s economy and convert it into gold. I’m pretty sure that will cause Superman and/or Captain Planet to declare me their nemesis, but what psychotic villain is complete without a nemesis?

It’s pretty much impossible to be certain how much money is in the world economy, but estimates seem to be on the order of US$50 trillion (in 2014 dollars). That works out to 938,438,439 gold balls (you don’t know how hard I had to fight to resist calling my currency the Hobo Sullivan Golden Testicle). That’s a total mass of 1.182e9 kilograms (1.182 billion kilograms) and a diameter of 54 meters (the balls still aren’t being crushed out of shape, so the packing efficiency is still stuck at 74%). 54 meters is pretty big in human terms. A 54-meter gold ball would make a pretty impressive decoration outside some sultan’s palace. If it hit the Earth as an asteroid, it would deposit more energy than the Chelyabinsk meteor, which, even though it exploded at an altitude of 30 kilometers, still managed to break windows and make scary sounds like this:

This golden asteroid would have a surface gravity of 0.108 millimeters per second squared, and a 10-second fall distance of 0.54 centimeters. Visible to the eye if you like sitting very still to watch small objects fall in weak gravitational fields (and they say I have weird hobbies), but still fairly close to the kind of micro-gravity you get on space stations. I can walk across the room, get my coffee cup, walk back, and sit down in 10 seconds (I timed it), and my falling object would still be almost exactly where I left it.

Obviously, we need to go bigger. Most small asteorids do not even approach hydrostatic equilibrium: they don’t have enough mass for their gravity to crush their constituent materials into spheres. For the majority of asteroids, the strength of their materials is greater than gravitational forces. But the largest asteroids do start to approach hydrostatic equilibrium. Here’s a picture of 4 Vesta, one of the other asteroids that’s been visited by a spacecraft (the awesome ion-engine-powered Dawn, in this case.)

(Image courtesy of NASA via Wikipedia.)

You’re probably saying “Hobo, that’s not very fucking spherical.” Well first of all, that’s a pretty damn rude way to discuss asteroids. Second of all, you’re right. That’s partly because of its gravity (still weak), partly because its fast rotation (once every 5 hours) deforms it into an oblate spheroid, and partly because of the massive Rheasilvia crater on one of its poles (which also hosts the solar system’s tallest known mountain, rising 22 kilometers above the surrounding terrain). But it’s pretty damn spherical when you compare it to ordinary asteroids, like 951 Gaspra, which is the shape of a chicken’s beak. It’s also large enough that its interior is probably more similar to a planet’s interior than an asteroid’s. Small asteroids are pretty much homogenous rock. Large asteroids contain enough rock, and therefore enough radioactive minerals and enough leftover heat from accretion, to heat their interiors to the melting point, at least briefly. Their gravity is also strong enough to cause the denser elements like iron and nickel to sink to the center and form something approximating a core, with the aluminosilicate minerals (the stuff Earth rocks are mostly made of) forming a mantle. Therefore, we’ll say that once my golden asteroid reaches the same mass as 4 Vesta, the gold in the center will finally be crushed sufficiently to squeeze out the empty space.

It would be convenient for my calculations if the whole asteroid melted so that there were no empty spaces anywhere. Would that happen, though? That’s actually not so hard to calculate. What we need is the golden asteroid’s gravitational binding energy, which is the amount of energy you’d need to peel the asteroid apart layer by layer and carry the layers away to infinity. This is the same amount of energy you’d deposit in the asteroid by assembling it one piece at a time by dropping golden balls on it. A solid gold (I’m cheating there) asteroid with Vesta’s mass (2.59e20 kg) would have a radius of 147 kilometers and a gravitational binding energy of about 1.827e25 Joules, or about the energy of 37 dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impacts. That’s enough energy to heat the gold up to 546 Kelvin, which is less than halfway to gold’s melting point.

But, you know what? Since I don’t have access to a supercomputer to model the compressional deformation of a hundred million trillion kilograms of close-packed gold spheres, I’m going to streamline things by melting the whole asteroid with a giant draconic space-laser. I’ll dispense with the gold spheres, too, and just pour molten gold directly on the surface.

You know where this is going: I want a whole planet made of gold. But if I’m going to build a planet, it’s going to need a name. Let’s call it Dragon’s Hoard. Sounds like a name Robert Forward would give a planet in a sci-fi novel, so I’m pleased. Let’s pump Dragon’s Hoard up to the mass of the Earth.

Dragon’s Hoard is a weird planet. It has the same mass as Earth, but its radius is only 66% of Earth’s. Its surface gravity is 22.64 meters per second squared, or 2.3 earth gees. Let’s turn off the spigot of high-temperature liquid gold (of course I have one of those) for a while and see what we get.

According to me, we get something like this:

The heat content of a uniform-temperature sphere of liquid gold depends on its volume, but since it’s floating in space, its rate of heat loss depends on surface area (by the Stefan-Boltzmann law). The heat can move around inside it, but ultimately, it can only leave by radiating off the surface. Therefore, not only will the sphere take a long time to cool, but its upper layers will cool much faster than its lower layers. Gold has a high coefficient of thermal expansion: it expands more than iron when you heat it up. Therefore, as the liquid gold at the surface cools, it will contract, lose density, and sink beneath the hotter gold on the surface. It will sink and heat up to its original temperature, and will eventually be displaced by the descent of cooler gold and will rise back to the surface. When the surface cools enough, it will solidify into a solid-gold crust, which is awesome. Apparently, my fantasies are written by Terry Pratchett, which is the best thing ever. I’ve got Counterweight Continents all over the place!

Gold is ductile: it’s a soft metal, easy to bend out of shape. Therefore, the crust would deform pretty easily, and there wouldn’t be too many earthquakes. There might, however, be volcanoes, where upwellings of liquid gold strike the middle of a plate and erupt as long chains of liquid-gold fountains. It would behave a bit like the lava lake at Kilauea volcano, in Hawai’i. See below:

What a landscape this would be! Imagine standing (in a spacesuit) on a rumpled plain of warm gold. To your right, a range of gold mountains glitter in the sun, broken here and there by gurgling volcanoes of shiny red-hot liquid. Flat, frozen puddles of gold fill the low spots, concave from the contraction they experienced as they cooled. To your right , the land undulates along until it reaches another mountain range. In a valley at the foot of this range is an incandescent river of molten gold, fed by the huge shield volcano just beyond the mountains. Then a psychotic space-dragon swoops down, flying through the vacuum (and also in the face of physics), picks you up in his talons, carries you over the landscape, and drops you into one of those volcanoes.

Yeah. It would be something like that.

As fun as my golden planet is, I think we could go bigger. Unfortunately, the bigger it gets, the more unpredictable its properties become. As we keep pouring molten gold on it, its convection currents will become more and more vigorous: it will have more trapped heat, a larger volume-to-surface area ratio, and stronger gravity, which will increase the buoyant force on the hot, low-density spots. Eventually, we’ll end up with convection cells, much like you see in a pot of boiling water. They might look like this:

Those are Rayleigh-Bénard cells, which you often get in convective fluids. I used that same picture in my Endless Sky article. But there, I was talking about supercritical oxygen and nitrogen. Here, it’s all gold, baby.

Eventually, the convection’s going to get intense enough and the heat’s going to get high enough that the planet will have a thin atmosphere of gold vapor. If it rotates, the planet will also develop a powerful magnetic field: swirling conductive liquid is believed to be the thing that creates the magnetic fields of Earth, the Sun, and Jupiter (and all the other planets). This planet is going to have some weird electrical properties. Gold is one of the best conductors there is, second only to copper, silver, graphene, and superconductors. Therefore, expect some terrifying lightning on Dragon’s Hoard: charged particles and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun will ionize the surface, the gold atmosphere (if there is one) or both, and Dragon’s Hoard will become the spherical terminal in a gigantic Van de Graaff generator. As it becomes more and more charged, Dragon’s Hoard will start deflecting solar-wind electrons more easily than solar-wind protons (since the protons are more massive), and will soak up protons, acquiring a net positive charge. It’ll keep accumulating charge until the potential difference explosively equalizes. Imagine a massive jet or bolt of lightning blasting up into space, carrying off a cloud of gold vapor, glowing with pink hydrogen plasma. Yikes.

After Dragon’s Hoard surpasses Jupiter’s mass, weird things will begin happening. Gold atoms do not like to fuse. Even the largest stars can’t fuse them. Therefore, the only things keeping Dragon’s Hoard from collapsing altogether are the electrostatic repulsion between its atoms and the thermal pressure from all that heat. Sooner or later, neither of these things will be enough, and we’ll be in big trouble: the core, compressed to a higher density than the outer portions by all that gold, will become degenerate: its electrons will break loose of their nuclei, and the matter will contract until the electrons are squeezed so close together that quantum physics prevents them from getting any closer. This is electron degeneracy pressure, and it’s the reason white dwarf stars can squeeze the mass of a star into a sphere the size of a planet without either imploding or exploding.

The equations involved here are complicated, and were designed for bodies made of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen instead of gold (Those short-sighted physicists never consider weird thought experiments when they’re unraveling the secrets of the universe. The selfish bastards.) The result is that I’m not entirely sure how large Dragon’s Hoard will be when this happens. It’s a good bet, though, that it’ll be somewhere around Jupiter’s mass. This collapse won’t be explosive: at first, only a fraction of the matter in the core will be degenerate.As we add mass, the degenerate core will grow larger and larger, and more and more of it will become degenerate. It will, however, start to get violent after a while. Electron-degenerate matter is an excellent conductor of heat, and its temperature will equalize pretty quickly. That means that we’ll have a hot ball of degenerate gold (Degenerate Gold. Add that to the list of possible band names.) surrounded by a thin layer of hot liquid gold. Because of the efficient heat transfer within the degenerate core, it will partly be able to overcome the surface-area-versus-volume problem and radiate heat at a tremendous rate.  The liquid gold on top, though, will have trouble carrying that heat away fast enough, and will get hotter and hotter, and thanks to its small volume, will eventually get hot enough to boil. Imagine a planet a little larger than Earth, its surface white-hot, crushed under a gravity of 500,000 gees, bubbles exploding and flinging evaporating droplets of gold a few kilometers as gaseous gold and gold plasma jet up from beneath. Yeah. Something like that.

But in a chemical sense, my huge pile of gold is still gold. The nuclei may be uncomfortably close together and stripped of all of their electrons, but the nuclei are still gold nuclei. For now. Because you know I’m going to keep pumping gold into this ball to see what happens (That’s also a line from a really weird porno movie.)

White dwarfs have a peculiar property: the more massive they are, the smaller they get. That’s because, the heavier they get, the more they have to contract before electron degeneracy pressure balances gravity. Sirius B, one of the nearest white dwarfs to Earth, has a mass of about 1 solar mass, but a radius similar to that of Earth. When Dragon’s Hoard reached 1.38 solar masses, it would be even smaller, having a radius of around 3000 kilometers. The stream of liquid gold would fall towards a blinding white sphere, striking the surface at 3% of the speed of light. The surface gravity would be in the neighborhood of 2 million gees. If the gravity were constant (which it most certainly would not be), the 10-second fall distance would be 2.7 times the distance between Earth and moon. Now we’re getting into some serious shit.

Notice that I specified three significant figures when I gave that mass: 1.38 solar masses. That is not by accident. As some of you may know, that’s dangerously close to 1.39 solar masses, the Chandrashekar limit, named after the brilliant and surprisingly handsome Indian physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (Side note: Chandrashekhar unfortunately died in 1995, but his wife lived until 2013. Last year. She was 102 years old. There’s something cool about that, but I don’t know what it is.) The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass a star can have and still be supported by electron degeneracy pressure. When you go above that, you’ve got big trouble.

When ordinary white dwarfs (made mostly of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and helium) surpass the Chandrasekhar limit by vacuuming mass from a binary companion, they are unable to resist gravitational contraction. They contract until the carbon and oxygen nuclei in their cores get hot enough and close enough to fuse and make iron. This results in a Type Ia supernova, which shines as bright as 10 billion suns. It’s only recently that our supercomputers have been able to simulate this phenomenon. The simulations are surprisingly beautiful.

I could watch that over and over again and never get tired of it.

Unfortunately, even though it’s made of gold (which, as I said, doesn’t like to fuse), the same sort of thing will happen to Dragon’s Hoard. When it passes the Chandrasekhar limit, it will rapidly contract until the nuclei are touching. This will trigger a bizarre form of runaway fusion. The pressure will force electrons to combine with protons, releasing neutrinos and radiation. Dragon’s Hoard will be heated to ludicrous temperatures, and a supernova will blow off its outer layers. What remains will be a neutron star, which, as I talked about in The Weather in Hell, is mostly neutrons, with a thin crust of iron atoms and an even thinner atmosphere of iron, hydrogen, helium, or maybe carbon. Most or all of the gold nuclei will be destroyed. The only thing that will stop the sphere from turning into a black hole is that, like electrons, neutrons resist being squeezed too close together, at least up to a limit.

But you know what? That tells us exactly how much gold you can hoard in one place: about 1.38 solar masses. So fuck you, Taylor from kindergarten! You can’t have infinity dollars! You can only have 0.116 trillion trillion trillion dollars (US, and according to June 2014 gold prices) before your gold implodes and transmutes itself into other elements! So there!

But while I’m randomly adding mass to massive astronomical objects (that’s what space dragons do instead of breathing fire), let’s see how much farther we can go.

The answer is: Nobody’s exactly certain. The Chandrasekhar limit is based on pretty well-understood physics, but the physics of neutron-degenerate matter at neutron star pressures and temperatures (and in highly curved space-time) is not nearly so well understood. The Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit (Yes, the same Oppenheimer you’re thinking of.) is essentially a neutron-degenerate version of the Chandrasekhar limit, but we only have the TOV limit narrowed down to somewhere between 1.5 solar masses and 3 solar masses. We’re even less certain about what happens above that limit. Quarks might start leaking out of neutrons, the way neutrons leak out of nuclei in a neutron star, and we might get an even smaller, denser kind of star (a quark star). At this point, the matter would stop being matter as we know it. It wouldn’t even be made of neutrons anymore. But to be honest, we simply don’t know yet.

Sooner or later, though, Karl Schwarzschild is going to come and kick our asses. He solved the Einstein field equations of general relativity (which are frightening but elegant, like a hyena in a cocktail dress) and discovered that, if an object is made smaller than its a certain radius (the Schwarzschild radius), it will become a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius depends only on the object’s mass, charge, and angular momentum. Dragon’s Hoard, or rather what’s left of it, doesn’t have a significant charge or angular momentum (because I said so), so its Schwarzschild radius depends only on mass. At 3 solar masses, the Schwarzschild radius is 8.859 kilometers, which is only just barely larger than a neutron star. Whether quark stars can actually form or not, you can bet your ass they’re going to be denser than neutron stars. Therefore, I’d expect Dragon’s Hoard to fall within its own Schwarzschild radius somewhere between 3 and 5 solar masses. Let’s say 5, just to be safe. There are suspected black holes with masses near 5.

That’s the end of Dragon’s Hoard. The physics in the center gets unspeakably weird, but the gold-spitting space dragon doesn’t get to see it. He’s outside the event horizon, which means the collapse of his hoard is hidden to him. He just sees a black sphere with a circumference of 92.77 kilometers, warping the images of the stars behind it. It doesn’t matter how much more gold we pour into it now: it’s all going to end up inside the event horizon, and the only noticeable effect will be that the event horizon’s circumference will grow larger and larger. But fuck that. If I wanted to throw money down a black hole, I’d just go to Vegas. (Heyo!) Dragon’s Hoard isn’t getting any more of my draconic space-gold.

But one last thing before I go. Notice how I suddenly went from saying Schwarzschild radius to talking about the event horizon’s circumference. That’s significant. Here’s a terrible picture illustrating why I did that:

Massive objects create curvature in space-time. Imagine standing at the dot on circle B, in the top picture. If you walk to the center-point along line A, you’ll measure a length a. If you then walk around circle B, you’ll get the circle’s circumference. You’ll find that that circumference is 2 * pi * a. The radius is therefore (circumference) / (2 * pi) But that only holds in flat space. When space is positively curved (like it is in the vicinity of massive objects), the radius of a circle will always be larger than (circumference) / (2 * pi). That is to say, radius C in the bottom picture is significantly longer than radius A in the top one, and longer than you would expect from the circumference of circle D.

In other words, the radius of a massive object like a star, a neutron star, or a black hole, differs from what you would expect based on its circumference. The existence of black holes and neutron stars has not actually been directly confirmed (because they’re so small and so far away). It is merely strongly suspected based on our understanding of physics. The existence of spacetime curvature, though, has been confirmed in many experiments.

Imagine you’re standing in a field that looks flat. There’s a weird sort of bluish haze in the center, but apart from that, it looks normal. You walk in a circle around the haze to get a better look at it. It only takes you fifteen minutes to walk all the way around and get back to your starting point. The haze makes you nervous, so you don’t walk straight into it. Instead, you walk on a line crossing the circle so that it passes halfway between the haze and the circle’s edge at its closest approach. Somehow, walking that distance takes you twenty minutes, which is not what you’d expect. When you walk past the haze at a quarter-radius, it takes you an hour. When you walk within one-eighth of a radius, it takes you so long you have to turn back and go get some water. Each time, you’re getting closer and closer to walking along the circle’s radius towards its center, but if you actually tried to walk directly into its center, where the haze is (the haze is because there’s so much air between you and the stuff beyond the haze, which is the same reason distant mountains look blue), you would find that the distance is infinite.

That’s how black holes are. They’re so strongly-curved that there’s way more space inside than there should be. The radius is effectively infinite, which is why it’s better to talk about circumference. As long as the black hole is spherically symmetric, circumferences are still well-behaved.

But the radius isn’t actually infinite. When you consider distance scales close to the Planck length, Einstein’s equations butt heads with quantum mechanics, and physicists don’t really know what the fuck’s going on. We still don’t know what happens near a black hole’s central singularity.

Incidentally, the Planck length compared to the diameter of an atom is about the same as the diameter of an atom compared to the diameter of a galaxy. The Universe is a weird place, isn’t it?