Quark Matter Hiding In Neutron Stars
How do we look into neutron stars? The key was to connect theoretical calculations and our observations of gravitational waves.
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The Universe is full of strange objects. And one of the most extreme are neutron stars. According to a team of Finnish researchers, the most massive of them have an exotic treasure inside. When they combined theoretical calculation with our observations of gravitational waves produced by a collision of neutron stars they found out that large neutron stars have quark matter inside of them.
In our day-to-day lives, we are surrounded by matter composed of atoms. Atoms themselves are made from densely packed protons and neutrons in their cores which have electrons orbit them just like planets orbit stars. But the insides of neutron stars are different. The conditions are so extreme in there that atoms collapse into extreme forms of matter. Protons and neutrons are so close to each other that the whole neutron star can be considered as a single gigantic atomic core.
Until now, we haven't been exactly sure how this extreme matter looks inside the cores of the most massive neutron stars. Astrophysicists had a suspicion that the matter there collapses into even a more extreme state of matter where even atomic cores do not exist anymore – quark matter.
Previously, even supercomputers found this problem too hard to solve. But the team of Aleksi Vuorinen decided to take a different approach. They combined the calculations of theoretical physics with new astrophysical data that we got thanks to gravitational astronomy. They concluded that in the largest neutron stars more than half of their total mass could be made from quark matter.
This certainly is a big discovery. It is almost as if we directly found quark matter. But the scientists are trying to remain calm. They understand that neutron stars are so bizarre and extreme that understanding them might be (at least for the moment) beyond our understanding. There is still a small possibility that neutron star – including the most massive ones are made only from normal “nuclear” matter.
Sources:
- https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/science-news/finnish-researchers-have-discovered-a-new-type-of-matter-inside-neutron-stars
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0914-9
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