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inigma said:
That 0.03G is what is holding Ceres together. Force Ceres to spin at a 1G centripetal rate, and you can imagine the concequence.
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I'm not sure that's the case. What's holding it together is not gravity. Gravity brings the material together in the first place and maybe later compresses it into denser material, but once it's all in place it's the atomic bonds between the atoms making up the rock that keep it from expanding to fill the vacuum around it. Otherwise, small rocks floating alone in space with negligible gravity would spontaneously vapourise the moment they got a sniff of a gravity well, and we know that don't happen.
Here's an experiment you can try at home: Take a big lump of rock. Drill a hole into it and then firmly screw or cement a hook into the hole. Use the hook to suspend the rock from above. Does the rock split in two, with the bottom half shearing away and crashing to the floor because of the 1G force pulling it downwards? Your hook might well pop out, depending on the weight of the rock and your metho of fastening, or the chain or crane might break, but the rock will be just fine.
Anyway, we established some time ago that we don't actually need to alter Ceres' spin at all, just its orbit. It's the coin surrounding Ceres that needs to spin.
And yes, you are right about the amazing properties required of the materials required to build this thing. I stated in an earlier post that such a material might be beyond credibility. However I have a feeling that it might work for smaller coins- perhaps only significantly smaller than Ceres, i don't know (Hell, you could you could use glass and steel up to a kilometre or ten, I reckon)- but I know for a fact that vast, Banksian structures would require bucketloads of unobtainium.
All that said, read up on carbon fullerenes. They have the potential to be insanely strong, and (I believe) transparent too.