[_joel]

Brown dwarfs fascinate me, they can be at room temperature (range from about 2,800 K down to 250 K (roughly 2,500 °C to -23 °C / 4,500 °F to -10 °F)

You could basically have a bath in a brown dwarf, sure you might not last long, but still...

[__MatrixMan__]

The idea of a black dwarf is also pretty wild. The universe isn't old enough for any black dwarves to exist yet, but eventually the brown ones will radiate enough heat away that they're no longer held up by the vibrational energy of the atoms they contain. They'll stop being fluffy and settle into a mode where they're held up only by electron degeneracy pressure (a.k.a the Pauli exclusion principle)... it's a bit like how neutron stars are stable because they're not so massive that they collapse to a black hole. Black dwarves will be stable because they're not so massive that they collapse to a neutron star.

What will this substance look like? Will it ring like a bell if struck? What color will it be? Will it conduct electricity? If so, how? Are the atomic nuclei now the charge carriers because the electrons are stuck? It would likely be a super-thermal-conductor, does that have any analogous properties to a super-electrical-conductor? Which of these can we observe without the sensor collapsing to degenerate matter itself?

I hope there's life around to conduct these experiments when they become possible.

[pfdietz]

Neutron stars are held up by neutron degeneracy pressure, btw, not electron degeneracy pressure. White dwarfs stars are held up by that (even though they can be very hot; the temperature needed to "lift" degeneracy increases with the mass of the object.) Even the cores of some very large stars are electron degenerate; this is why they remain stable against the "pair production instability": there aren't any states into which newly created electrons can go, suppressing pair production.