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.
In short, no.
Preventing a supernova would require halting the gravitational collapse of the star as it runs out of fuel. This means either feeding the star faster than it can burn (our sun is too small to nova and still burns through 600 million tons of hydrogen per second), or removing the iron, silicon and other metals from the core of the star faster than they can build up (slightly fewer hundreds of millions of tons per second).
You’re going to need some very unrealistic scifi to accomplish either of those. Either some mechanism for pulling gigatons per second from the bottom of the star’s gravity well, a plentiful supply of gas giant planets you can drop into it, or both.