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Exotic "Electroweak" Star Predicted
astroengine writes "A new type (or phase) of star has been characterized by Case Western Reserve University scientists in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters. The 'electroweak' star is a stellar corpse too massive to be a quark star, yet too light to collapse into a black hole. It crushes and burns the quarks inside, generating an outward radiation pressure that acts against gravity. Interestingly, the interior is predicted to be a 'Big Bang factory,' forcing the electromagnetic and weak forces to collapse as one (hence 'electroweak') — a condition that hasn't been seen elsewhere in our universe since moments after the Big Bang." The article notes that the first calculations on electroweak stars pegged them as an intermediate stage on the way to a black-hole collapse, lasting at most a second. The new calculations suggest that electroweak stars could persist for millions of years.
As always with cosmology, you have a pretty huge margin of error
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, that's just a few orders of magnitude off. Seen the error bars on intergalactic distances?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Yep, could persist for million years, give or take a billion or two.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
From TFA:
If you're going to pretend to quote the article at least try to get it right. It says nowhere that the stars themselves can't exist now. It says that the cores of these stars, if they do exist, have conditions that haven't been seen for perhaps 10 billion+ years.
This isn't physics. It's math and programming, with someone interpreting it as a physical possibility.
That's what theoretical physics is. It's the experimentalists and observationalists who confirm or refute the theorists' predictions.
Step 5. ???
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, there's always three question marks!