Quark Stars

BigGar' writes "Astronomers seem to have discovered a new type of star. It would lie between a neutron star and and a black hole in the hierarchy of stars and consist of quark matter. Further observations with the Chandra X-ray telescope will be needed to confirm the results."

Comments

Quark Matter is Not New

[dragons_flight]

Quark stars are a new and interesting idea, but quark matter in general is not a new idea. "Quark matter", more usually "quark plasma" or "quark-gluon plasma", is believed to be the dominant form of matter in the universe just following the big bang. There is also early evidence that it's been witnessed in some of the largest particle accelerators.

In normal matter quarks group together in sets of 3 to form protons and nuetrons. Rare particles, like pions, can be formed from pairs of quarks, but quarks never appear in isolation, for them it's always in groups of 2 or 3. In quark plasmas though there aren't any distinct groups of twos and threes. All the quarks are smushed into a single substance with arbitrarily large numbers of quarks.

One analogy is if atoms are built out of "solid" quarks (in the from of protons and nuetrons), then the quark plasma is like melting them so they all run together. Prior to this announcement the only time that quark plasmas were expected to appear was in the presence of extraordinarily high energies and temperatures.

We could predict that nuetrons stars should exist because the "nuetron degeneracy pressure" which makes them possible was well understood theoretically. The theory that governs quark interaction is known as quantum chromodynamics and is far more complicated. I'm not sure whether anyone knows how to apply it to massive collapsing stars, and it doesn't surprise me if no one ever tried. It will be interesting to see if the existing theory can be made to justify quark stars. If not, well that's when things really start to get exciting.

Re:more important things to do in space ...

[KjetilK]

On the contrary, my friend, on the contrary!

If you lived 150 years ago, what would your idea of "communication technology" be like?

Without Planck trying to understand blackbodies, Quantum Mechanics might never have had the kick it needed, to get Bohr's ponderings into the structure of atoms. In 1900, most problems seemed nearly solved, except for two little "clouds on physics' sky" as noted by Kelvin. It turned out that these two clouds would lead to QM and relativity. And they had quite a lot to do with observations done in astronomy.

Without these ideas, there would be no semiconductors, there would be no computers. You wouldn't be posting to /. if it hadn't been for those looking into the most fundamental questions of their time.

Quarks, quark-gluon plasma are among the most fundamental questions of our time.

What would a manned mission to Mars give us? Well, some kewl tech, quite a lot of resources into research, and probably also a positive long-term effect following from the increased attention given to science.

But it is not likely to be of fundamental importance to our world-view. It is not likely to do anything to give us understanding that is going to be used in that kind of technology you can't even imagine today.