Far out cosmology: strange quark stars may exist (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 19, 2020, 01:41 (1434 days ago) @ David Turell

And may not be fully distinguishable from white dwarfs:

https://www.universetoday.com/149224/is-there-a-way-to-detect-strange-quark-stars-even-...

"The world we see around us is built around quarks. They form the nuclei of the atoms and molecules that comprise us and our world. While there are six types of quarks, regular matter contains only two: up quarks and down quarks. Protons contain two ups and a down, while neutrons contain two downs and an up. On Earth, the other four types are only seen when created in particle accelerators. But some of them could also appear naturally in dense objects such as neutron stars.

"The standard model for neutron stars holds that neutrons remain largely intact within their interior. Thus, a neutron star is like a huge atomic nucleus held together by gravity rather than the strong nuclear force. But we don’t fully understand how neutrons interact at extreme temperatures and densities. It’s possible that within a neutron star the neutrons break down into a soup of quarks, forming what is known as a quark star. Quark stars would look like neutron stars but would be slightly smaller.

***

"...it is worth looking for strange matter objects in the universe, and recently a study has found a few candidates. The study searched for a type of object known as strange dwarfs. These hypothetical objects have a mass similar to a white dwarf, but instead of being made of regular matter in a degenerate state, they are made of strange quark matter. As a result, they would be much smaller than white dwarfs.

***

"If you know the mass and surface gravity of a star, you can easily calculate its radius. The team did this and then compared them to the mass and radius relation for white dwarfs. Most of them followed the relation, but 8 of the stars didn’t. They were much smaller in size and matched predictions for a quark dwarf.

"The data of this work isn’t strong enough to prove these objects are strange dwarfs, but they are worth further study. Something is strange about them, and it would be good to determine whether that’s due to strange quarks or something else."

Comment: We have no explanation as to why the universe is so weird. The human mind has developed the Standard Model and it works just fine. We know the universe is fine-tuned to allow life. We don't understand why quarks are quarks, and the designer isn't talking, but with our brains we can figure out lots of the mysteries. And the moral is survival is not needed to have a brain like this. This clearly means survivability is not an issue which causes any sort of any evolutionary advance. It is an unproven Darwinistic proposal. 'Survival of the fittest' is a tautology, and doesn't tell us how speciation happens.