Can you envision a technology that could mine a nebula?

Take a deep breath and let it out. Now consider this. The air you just exhaled was about 100,000,000,000,000,000 times denser then the gas in an interstellar nebula. read more

To give you a more tangible idea of just how low the density of a nubula is, an area of gas in the Pillars of Creation the size of Earth would weigh 1 to 2.2 kg. Now imagine a 1 meter (or 1 yard) square in front of you. The air in that imaginary meter weights about the same as an earth-sized region of nebula. read more

So, you can have a star inside a tiny nebula (by nebula standards) in your (binary-star) system, visible from a habitable planet orbiting the other star. I do not know whether you could see a nebula that doesn't also contain a star. read more

Tungsten and cobalt alloys probably melt between the mp's of the two elements, and cobalt melts at ~1,500°C; W at 3,500°C at 1 atmosphere; at the much greater pressures inside the Earth, I don't know how much those numbers will increase, but you could figure a 1:1 alloy would be 2,500°C mp, and increase that by 50% at high pressure. read more