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The Question
(Submitted April 12, 2002)
Recently I read an article about a new type of star. They call it a
strange quark star. It is like a neutron star (composed of neutrons)
except it is made of quarks. The article said that there was one
detected 400 light-yrs away. Is this actually true? do you have any
other information on the subject?
The Answer
This is quite an interesting discovery. I may be misrepresenting it
slightly, as I haven't read the whole paper, but I would say the big
discovery here is that the star in question appears to be as massive
as a neutron star but smaller in diameter than a neutron star can be.
Possible answers are that the diameter is not as small as we think,
neutron stars can in fact be much smaller (which would mean we have a
big misunderstanding of the equation of state of neutron matter), or
that it's a new form of matter. If the last, quark matter seems an
obvious candidate. Quark matter has been seen at CERN:
http://press.web.cern.ch/CERN/Announcements/2000/NewStateMatter/story.html
This is all very new, and may turn out to be incorrect. There aren't
any theories yet about precisely how a quark star would form.
However, it's certainly safe to say that there will be many very
soon. Stay tuned!
Hope that helps.
-Kevin Boyce and Martin Still
for "Ask a High Energy Astronomer"
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