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

"Up" quarks and "down" quarks.

[Renraku]

Does anyone know if all up quarks are the same as all other up quarks and if all down quarks are the same as all other down quarks? There might be a billion different slight variations of the two kinds. We don't have the equipment to define a quark past a certain level.

Re:Star Trek Deep Space Nine

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, the word Quark comes from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

From the Fourth Chapter of the Second Book:

-- Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn't un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmer- stown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You're the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah's ark
And you think you're cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy's the spry young spark
That'll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that's how that chap's going to make his money and mark!
Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans.

Is any of this real?

[ClubPetey]

Ok, seriously, I'm not a physicist, but I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff. Or is everything just one (educated) guess on top of another.

Yes, we've made some discoveries, and for the most part things can be explained with the current line of thinking in Physics (Newton, Einstein, etc), but that's the problem, things are only MOSTLY explained, and certain keys are missing.

Take Newton, we've got all sorts of formulas, rules, and experiements built upon the concept of gravity. Something which we cannot define, do not know how it is "made" nor where it comes from. Or perhaps think of the stars, do we KNOW that this star is 8 billion light-year away? Or are we just guessing based on some color-shifting theory that seems to work here on Earth, based on guesses about the total mass of the universe (that we can't find some large percentage of...)

What if we humans are all WAY WAY wrong? What if like the "flat-earthers" of centuries ago, we've justified our THEORY of the planets, stars, solar systems, and the universe based on a completely incorrect model just becuase researchers (or humans in general) don't like to admit they are wrong, or that they don't know something? Are there any radical thinkers left? someone perhaps not starting from Newton or Einstein's work and trying to move it forward, but someone with NO preconsceptions, NO ingrained ideas, and NO outside influences?

Actually, nevermind, even if a person like that did exist, he'd be labeled as a quack in the media, shunned and laughed at by acedemia and problably killed by a nervous government.

Just some random thoughts on a quiet night...

Re:Is any of this real?

[dragons_flight]

Something that one gets used to in science is that you don't know anything in the absolute sense, but you probably do "know" things to the degree that you're willing to base your life's work off of them. On the other hand, if you spend too much time around philosophers, you might end up wondering if the world really exists, or if your senses are accurate, etc.

Doubt goes hand in hand with wisdom. Once one accepts that there is room to question absolutely everything, then you just have to accept the attitude of estimating what is the most likely truth and working from there. In my (admittedly biased) estimation the laws of physics, as currently understood, are almost certainly a good approximation of truth, though certainly not the last word.

In science, careers are made by showing that the established beliefs are wrong. There are lots of people itching to overturn current theories. Sometimes there is resistance if the evidence is weak or the argument complicated, but in the long run scientists are often more likely to admit their mistaken beliefs than the public in general.

If there really is a right answer to the universe then an independant thinker should arrive at similar conclusions to the ones we already have. Unfortunately no man ever born could even learn all the science we have now, so it's nigh impossible to believe that any single person could have the capacity to independantly arrive at more than a very small part of what has already become established doctrine. On the other hand, Ramanujan did quite well, and without being shunned or killed.

If some day we do contact an intelligent alien race, that would be other best chance to study an independant notion of science. However, I doubt that they'll offer too many surprises among the areas of science that have been studied in detail.

Re:Is any of this real?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Ok, seriously, I'm not a physicist, but I did pay attention in High School/College, and I have to ask: Do we KNOW any of this stuff. Or is everything just one (educated) guess on top of another.

Well, there is no revealed truth in science, so we don't ever know absolutely that something is real. It has happened before that a theory turns out to be based on a house of cards. Most of that time, in retrospect, it can be seen that the theory got way out in front of experiment and so was improperly constrained. That is, the less we've studied an area, the more likely the theoriest are wrong. As facts come in, theories get revised or strengthened.

On the other hand, remember that in physics, most "revolutions" change our understanding of how things work but do not invalidate existing theories in their realm of applicability. For example, relativity didn't kill Newtonian theory. Indeed, that's still where we start today in physics education. Why didn't it? Because at human-scale speeds, with human-scale masses, objects obey Newton's Law pretty well... that's the region in which the theory was derived and it fits the experiments there. At the very fast, it breaks down, and then relativity is needed.

Now, we insist the Universe is "really" relativistic at all speeds, so in that sense the new theory wiped out the old. But we also insist that for slow objects relativity must reduce to Newton's Law (and it does). So the earlier theory reamins a useful, if admittedly inadequate, tool.

Re:Why can we see it?

[PhuCknuT]

If it were dense enough that light couldn't escape, it would form a singularity too. Can't have one without the other, if it's high enough density to trap light, then there are no forces, even at the subatomic level, that can resist the collapse to a singularity. What they are talking about here is a stage that they didn't realize existed, where very dense neutron stars collapse one level further without becoming a black hole.

Re:Quark Matter is Not New

[Phase Shifter]

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.

That's pretty close to the truth, but you missed one important detail.
Pions (and other mesons) are made from a paired quark and antiquark, not two quarks.

Baryons like protons and neutrons are made up of three quarks bound together by their color charges, so for example a proton is (I think) made of two up quarks and a down quark, where you have one quark each of red, green, and blue color charge. Mesons contain a quark and an antiquark of the opposite color (i.e. red and antired).

And a 4th dimension

[trezor]

Physicians say they can't account for all the enrgy and mass that are beeing sucked into a black hole. As one of the elementary laws of physics is that the mass/energy of the universe is constant, this is a rather interesting remark.

It would mean that the remained of this energy goes off to somewhere else. Where? Noby knows.

But if this string theory implies that a black hole can memorize the structures of what is beeing drawn into it, that would make all that sci-fi black-hole/worm-hole multidimensional-travel things alot more real. At least in theory.

Because if mass and energy disappears it has to appear somewhere else. And the only way it can go somewhere else, is by using dimensions unkown to us.

I know this sounds spaced out beyond belief, but I like to keep my mind open for new things. If they're scientific enough :)

Could anyone actually knowing anything about string-theory comment this?

strange matter

[mghiggins]

I did a PhD on pulars, which everyone thinks are neutron stars. At one point I found a paper which suggested that instead they might be "strange matter" stars - and it's always intrigued me how difficult it is to distinguish between the two.

The cool thing about finding strange matter stars is that it suggests there's a lower-energy state of matter than our normal up/down quark pairings. No one's really sure because QCD is so hard to get numbers out of.

Every time they build a new accelerator someone harps on this, worrying about whether we'll ram particles together hard enough to create a meta-stable bubble of strange matter. If there is a net saving in energy due to expanding that bubble (drop in energy due to increasing volume of lower-energy-state matter, increase in energy due to increased surface tension on the surface), the bubble will tend to expand and gobble up everything in its path - like the Earth, for example.

That's the common worry, though it's easily allayed by noting that particles with much higher energy than anything we could create in an accelerator are hitting our atmosphere all the time, and none of them have turned our planet into a jiggling mass of strange matter.

Anyway, interesting idea.