Is there any conceivable way to "turn off" a star?

In my world, a group of "lamplighters" seek to turn off unused stars to conserve the energy for later use. This serves a few purposes, but mainly:

• It delays the heat-death of the Universe to some insanely distant point in the future.
• It can be used to preserve a planet's history. For instance, if our own sun was about to become a red giant, it could be turned off as to avoid destroying Earth and all of its history.

I want to know if there is any conceivable way to stop a star from burning. Ideally, this would happen without destroying any exoplanets, but that's not a requirement. The only requirement is that a good portion of the mass is left over for later use (e.g a black hole wouldn't work for this).

For the sake of this question, let's say they have near-infinite resources at their disposal.

The only thing I can think of at the moment is smashing the star with some gigantic, dense object a few times its size. But even then, I'm not convinced it would be effective. Even if it was, slowing down something with that much mass afterwards wouldn't be easy, even accounting for near-magical technology.

posted over 4 years ago

Nathaniel Pisarski‭

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