Posted on 08/02/2016 8:05:32 PM PDT by MtnClimber
This may be the golden age of particle physics discoveries.
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Never heard the term “quark matter”
Very difficult but interesting stuff.
Waiting for the physicists to weigh in... Love this stuff when explained to lay people like me.
I always enjoyed physics, but my career has been as an electrical engineer.
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It's a fairly simple idea, I think, predicated on the kinetic energy of the constituent particles, i.e. the temperature.
Neutrons and protons are bound states of quarks, but if the temperature is high enough, these bound states can be broken so that we have a "quark plasma", directly analgous to an "atomic plasma" i.e. a "plasma" as we usually refer to it, where the high temperature causes the atoms to dissociate into electrons and ions.
ExoticQuarksMatter
We can really run this meme into the ground.
When physicists celebrate, do they pop there quarks?
Okay I’ll stop now.
Their
Thanks for the explanation dr_lew.
Hi dr_lew,
From the article: neutron stars, the densest stellar objects in the universe.
Is there some qualifier there that makes neutron stars more dense than black holes?
Thanks in advance.
OK. I’m out of my league :)
Beginner’s book suggestion?
I think maybe the “qualifier” here is that the black hole is “infinitely dense”, being a singularity. If we use the event horizon as a radius, we get a very wide deviation in the “density”. I believe it is popularly concieved that the universe itself is a black hole, within which we live, and that the observed event horizon of universal expansion is its radius. In this case the “infinite density” would have to refer to the moment of origin of the universe. Because, after all, the black hole is a concept of space-time, and not to be thought of as any kind of spatial object which exists statically in time.
... that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Fair enough. Thanks!
Thanks. :)
Anyone read something lats year about a particle affecting another particle even though they were tremendous distances apart?
Sorry, that’s the best I could word it.
Thanks for posting... I love neutron stars! They have some weird and scary properties. Such as... If you fell off your barstool on a neutron star, you’d hit the floor at more than a million miles per hour... The magnetic fields are so great, they’d rip the iron right out of your blood (and body) from thousands of miles away... the energy density of the magnetic fields on some neutron stars is more than that of lead (so that THE EMPTY SPACE around the star weighs more than lead)... etc.
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