Star lifting

The star lifting techniques that have been proposed would operate by increasing this natural plasma flow and manipulating it with magnetic fields.

The simplest system for star lifting would increase the rate of solar wind outflow by directly heating small regions of the star's atmosphere, using any of a number of different means to deliver energy such as microwave beams, lasers, or particle beams – whatever proved to be most efficient for the engineers of the system.

These accelerators would be physically separate from each other but would exchange two counterdirected beams of oppositely charged ions with their neighbor on each side, forming a complete circuit around the star.

David Criswell[2] proposed a modification to the polar jet system in which the magnetic field could be used to increase solar wind outflow directly, without requiring additional heating of the star's surface.

In this system the ring of particle accelerators would not be in orbit, instead depending on the outward force of the magnetic field itself for support against the star's gravity.

An alternative to the Huff-n-Puff method for using the toroidal magnetic field to increase solar wind outflow involves placing the ring stations in a polar orbit rather than an equatorial one.

Finally, the resulting jets would spiral outward from the star's equator rather than emerging straight from the poles; this could complicate harvesting it, as well as the arrangement of the Dyson sphere powering the system.

The material lifted from a star will emerge in the form of plasma jets hundreds or thousands of astronomical units long, primarily composed of hydrogen and helium and highly diffuse by current engineering standards.

Increasing Jupiter's mass about 100-fold would turn it into a star, allowing it to supply energy to its moons and also to the asteroid belt.

Theoretically, most of the energy stored in the matter lifted from a star could be harvested if it is made into small black holes, via the mechanism of Hawking radiation.