A question regarding the physics of the sun

[Spokavriel]

Super cooled... I really should double check my statements but its still mind bogglingly improbable to get the atoms to crystallize in an environment such as the Sun.

[Crescent Pulsar R]

Still, this is all interesting. I just wish I had to academic background to understand it all. XD

[Quickshot0]

Yeah... well except maybe if you get them to form a degenerate matter... well after some short looking the best I could find was that you could get Hydrogen to crystallize under extreme pressures, though this is probably more applicable to Jupiter then the Sun. Some further searching turned up this, where the relevant portion notes that white dwarfs are crystalline in nature, once you get past the atmosphere.

Still, considering that stellar cores don't seem all to friendly to degenerate matter, I suspect you are right in that getting any thing to form in an active star for long is pretty hopeless. Though most likely the Helium Flash, mentioned earlier in this thread, does have a brief degenerate phase. Which I guess would imply that for a brief moment even stars you can sometimes crystallize some atomic matter. So yeah... insanity, and does this mean that we've just surpassed the improbable and all that.

Worst of all, that temporary degenerate matter phase in the star would probably in part be crystalline Helium. Yeah... I want my godhood.

[forbinkun]

Magnetic fields (at least those which have been reliably measured) are inherently dipoles -- i.e. there is no
monopole source of magnetic fields (like a charged particle is for an electric field). The upshot is that a stronger
solar magnetic field would have ingress and egress points on the sun, still. So, you'd likely get larger sun spots, and more
sun spots, but not the whole sun. A likely consequence would be much larger intensity solar flare activity --
i.e. the kind of flare activity seen in some 'active' stars where the solar flux novas to 10-100x normal levels. (Have you
read Inconstant Moon?)

Some kinds of instability are not well understood -- it is not implausible for a 'stable G2 star' like the sun to exhibit
some kinds of instability leading to super flare-level events. Such flares could be serious issues for the earth though...
These would not effect the interior of the sun much if at all-- think of atmospheric storms on the earth.

So -- you might be able to instigate flare activity with some external source of magnetic field -- say a close orbiting planet
which lasts long enough to "windup" a lot of energy into the solar magnetic field. The power would come from the loss of
orbit energy.

Hope this helps --