Posted on 04/10/2002 5:40:58 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
Interesting. Gravity is too strong to have a neutron star, but not quite strong enough to produce a black hole...
Perhaps one day, people will learn to live like quarks.
Jeez, is it too much to ask the reporter to use the same units in the same paragraph???
The Washington Post Article on this subject is even worse. No indication of the units!
Neutron stars cool off by radiating tiny particles called neutrinos. After 10 years, such a star's temperature should be about five million degrees. After that, it cools more slowly.Given its age, Helfand expected the temperature of 3C58 to be a bit less than two million degrees.
"Our observations show in the case of this remnant that the temperature is far lower than that and the energy being radiated is down by at least a factor of 10 from (what was expected)," he said.
up, down,strange, charmed,bottom and top
All are names for types of Quarks.
Each name also can be come as a red, green or blue.
See page 65 in Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History Of Time
Or just could be calling the star strange.
I was aware of strange quarks, but unaware of whether any kind of ordinary matter collapse can actually leave you with only strange quarks. I forget what a neutron is made of, but I believe all the particles made of quarks require some mix of different ones.
Looking for help with same, I found This Rather Prescient Slide-Show Display.
Neutrons are made up of three quarks, two so-called "down" quarks and one "up" quark. On Earth, free quarks do not exist and while their existence can be inferred from atom smasher data, none has ever been directly observed.For some reason, the normal neutron quarks change flavor and are all strange quarks in the Strange Quark Star. You got it. I suspected but was very unsure.RXJ 1856, however, implies the existence of an entire star made up of free quarks, a so-called "strange quark star." In that case, some of the original up and down quarks would have been transformed into "strange" quarks (hence the name). Quark stars also could exist with an outer shell of neutrons and a core of free quarks.
BTW, that "atom smasher" takes me back to the 50s. How old was the guy who wrote that article?
Hadrons (particles made up of quarks and gluons) are of two types: mesons and baryons. Mesons (such as pions) are made up of a quark and an antiquark; the color charge of the quark cancels the anticolor of the antiquark. Baryons (such as protons and neutrons) are made up of three quarks, and the three color charges (red, green, blue) add up to a colorless particle.
(Geek alert: these quarks are merely the "valence quarks" of the particle; a real hadron is filled with a "sea" of virtual quark-antiquark pairs of all quark flavors.)
Neutrons are made up of two down quarks and an up quark. Protons are made up of two up quarks and a down quark. Other types of baryons also include one or more of the heavier quarks (strange, charm, bottom, top).
There are other states of matter that are permitted by quantum chromodynamics. The most famous is the quark-gluon plasma. In this state, the hadrons lose all integrity, and the quarks and gluons are free to travel throughout the medium, rather than being confined. This requires a fantastic amount of energy, however, and once it cools enough the plasma crystalizes into hadrons.
However.
Most calculations of quark-gluon plasmas include only up and down quarks. This is sensible, because we try to create such plasmas using heavy ions, which are made up of protons and neutrons. But this may not be a good approximation in all cases. Some calculations indicate that if there are enough strange quarks in the plasma, the plasma may be stable. That is, it may represent a lower energy state than the equivalent baryon-number worth of neutrons. If this is the case, then it is possible that a neutron star might spontaneously transition into this state of matter, becoming one giant subatomic particle (and releasing energy in the process). The properties of such a "strange star" would be very different from a standard neutron star.
Kind of makes one wonder why the super conducting super collider project was scrapped. Would have come in handy for researhing these particles.
This strange quark star is not being called a black hole.That makes one wonder what a black hole would be composed of.
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