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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."
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.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.