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?
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.
They probably had to recall an employee who was pre-Jschool to write this up.