The Rev Dodgson said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
Mysterious Object May Be a ‘Strange Star’ Made Out of Quarks, Scientists Say
A relatively small, dense object cloaked within a cloud of its own exploded remains just a few thousand light-years away is defying our understanding of stellar physics.
By all accounts it seems to be a neutron star, though it’s an unusual one at that. At just 77 percent of the mass of the Sun, it’s the lowest mass ever measured for an object of its kind.
more…
radius 10.4 kilometers,
mass 0.77 solar masses.
Isn’t everything made out of quarks?
Not in this way. Not free quarks without protons and neutrons.
Quark stars have been hypothesised for as long as quarks have been known to exist, perhaps longer.
There have been plenty of papers about the presence of zones in a neutron star that are dominated by quark-matter. I wonder what the state of the art is on that. Looking it up, this looks like a good place to start. Published 30 June 2022. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.00033.pdf
It’s even worth looking at this paper for the pretty pictures in it.
From this diagram, quark matter is confined to the innermost core of neutron stars.
“A chunk of such a self-bound quark matter can form a quark star with the arbitrarily small mass.”
That’s new to me.
“pastas”?
