As hinted at in the title, assuming the technology/means existed that could absorb energy fast enough, would it be possible to stop a star from going supernova, effectively “calming” it?
This is for a novel (not exactly a sci-fi one) but I’d like to keep in the realms of “technically possible”.
Edit. Thank you to everyone for providing answers and specific thanks to @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] for the for the further reading/watching materials that have inspired a narrative solution that is kinda hand-wave-y but should be good enough to hold up to scrutiny until the moment someone with a PhD (or good enough knowledge) takes a closer look at a fictional word with a soft magic system and smashes the big ol’ BS button which I think is about as much as fantasy novel writer can ask for.
/u/[email protected] explains this well, though I got a different take on the analogy.
Imagine you are trying to put air into a deflating balloon that’s about to ‘loose form’ that’s essentially what you are trying.
Put just enough air (energy/mass) into the star and it will stay stable, loosing as much as you put into it.
Too little and the star will dissolved, in this example you’d fully absorb it.
Too much and you are essentially infusing a star with so much mass that it explodes all over again.
If you are trying to stabilise a star this way, ideally, it would never even begin to go nova.