Some Stars May Be Made of Strange Matter

Science fiction posits all sorts of weird matter with unusual properties. Star Trek has it's second and third periodic tables for example. Though the exact details can be murky and often Retroactively re-imagined. But there are theoretical and now even lab verified forms of odd matter.

Recently in the news collider labs have produced and verified particles made of 4 and 5 quarks instead of the usual 2 or three. Also strange baryons with an unusual quark make up have been verified in the lab.

In fiction; one of my favorite forms of weird matter is made of monopoles. Because they are so tiny the bonds between particles and atoms made of monopoles is millions of times stronger than ordinary matter. The stuff will hold up inside the crushing pressure of gas giants, and even inside stars and on the surface of neutron stars. You basically cannot spin, fondle, mutilate or melt it.You could bust a few hundred nuclear bombs on a hull made of it and be none the worse for wear. And because monopole atoms correspond to all the atoms and spaces in the regular periodic table they can be arranged in their own periodic table. You can have regular carbon for example and a monopole based atom with stand in particles for each particle in a carbon atom and so on. incidently since the bonds are more powerful, chemistry with monopole matter holds as much energy as as an atomic bonding energy in normal matter. that means a chemical explosion with monopoles is as powerful as an atomic bomb of ordinary atoms.

Then there is this: www.livescience.com...

It seems that some stars and neutron stars are likely made out of strangelets (which is another type of strange matter.) In fact it is the origin of the term "strange matter." among the properties of strange matter is the ability to convert regular matter into strange matter. If there is a mass difference it would liberate energy. Strange matter reactors have been proposed but I think they would be more dangerous than harnessing a black hole honestly. A runaway reaction could convert you and your planet or space ship into strange matter and that would not be a happy ending.

But the upshot here is some forms of strange matter would solve a heck of a lot of engineering problems. and it is possible that there may be some near by.

the closest neutron star i am aware of* co-orbits with Sirius which is not that far away. At 8.6 light years away is the triple star system of sirius. Sirius B is a white dwarf consisting of degenerate matter. the reason neutron stars are mentioned is that it is possible that we can tell the difference between a vanilla neutron star and a strange matter star by gravity wave signature soon.

EDIT: * the nearest verified neutron star is actually a lot farther away but there is nothing to stop a white dwarf from having strange matter or ordinary stars from being made of strange matter. we just would have a harder time measuring some signature which would prove the presence of strange matter. www.space.com...

Now Sirius B is described as a white dwarf rather than a neutron star. However the difference besides electrons vs neutrons WRT to Stellar objects is the mass of the progenitor star. I think the mass of the progenitor star was larger than Sol. and Sirius b was larger than Sirius A.

at any rate in cosmic terms Sirius is right on our door step. if we do detect the tell tale gravity wave signature it is potentially possible to get there without a FTL drive.

as a side note there are other forms of strange matter that may be nearby such as axionic or other forms of dark matter or negative matter (not the same as antimatter and not the exotic matter needed for warp drive either.)

Any one of those could supply us with material that a sci-fi writer could only dream of.

a reply to: stormbringer1701

A valuable and insightful as well as educational thread, very very interesing thank you.

you're welcome

there is also a recent article on a form of dark matter that may consist of contiguous clumps of quark matter in a solid form. so there is strange stuff out there.

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
It seems that some stars and neutron stars are likely made out of strangelets (which is another type of strange matter.)

Interesting OP. I've seen sources say it's hypothetically possible, but have you got a reliable source saying it's "likely". I have no idea how likely it is and I'm not sure anybody else does. Here's a source saying it's all hypothetical:

How CERN’s Discovery of Exotic Particles May Affect Astrophysics

Very simply, the traditional model of a neutron star is that it is made of neutrons. Neutrons consist of three quarks (two down and one up), but it is generally thought that particle interactions within a neutron star are interactions between neutrons. With the existence of tetraquarks, it is possible for neutrons within the core to interact strongly enough to create tetraquarks. This could even lead to the production of pentaquarks and hexaquarks, or even that quarks could interact individually without being bound into color neutral particles. This would produce a hypothetical object known as a quark star.

This is all hypothetical at this point, but verified evidence of tetraquarks will force astrophysicists to reexamine some the assumptions we have about the interiors of neutron stars.

Here is a paper talking about how we might find evidence for strange stars, but such evidence hasn't yet been found to my knowledge:

The Strange Star Surface: A Crust with Nuggets

We reexamine the surface composition of strange stars. Strange quark stars are hypothetical compact stars which could exist if strange quark matter was absolutely stable. It is widely accepted that they are characterized by an enormous density gradient ($~10^[26]$ g/cm$^4$) and large electric fields at surface. By investigating the possibility of realizing a heterogeneous crust, comprised of nuggets of strange quark matter embedded in an uniform electron background, we find that the strange star surface has a much reduced density gradient and negligible electric field. We comment on how our findings will impact various proposed observable signatures for strange stars.

well its possible enough that they are going to look for the signature. also as i said we have produced some forms of strange matter in our physics labs. in addition the contiguous quark lump candidate for dark matter is serious in that the other candidates have not been found narrowing the pool of possibilities while not excluding this

EDIT: also as far as i know a quark star and a strange star are different species. so the article you linked to is not the same thing i was talking about. in the one i am talking about the degenerate matter is replaced with pairs or triplets of strange matter. the one you linked to would not result in contact transformations when the quarks in the quark star touched regular matter. the article i posted talks about how a strange star can convert a co-orbiting regular star into a strange star.

furthrmore your article acts as if we have not found tetra quarks. we have.

www.techtimes.com...

we have also found pentaquarks if i am not mistaken.

www.economist.com...

and finally:

lumpy darkmatter:

www.livescience.com...

going a bit further afield, the negative matter i was talking about should be called mirror matter. it's not negative in the sense of having negative mass or energy. but it is a type of matter that can exist in right in front of you and yet you cannot see it or interact with it except by inelastic collisions and gravity. normal matter can hypothetically be turned into mirror matter via a mirror magnetic field and visa versa. now it might have negative mass and energy but that is not a requisite property of mirror matter so it is expected to have regular mass and energy. but you know; there are labs still testing to see if antimatter fall up so i guess it cannot be excluded.

At any rate one of the main reasons i started the thread was I love the idea of odd science fictiony matter and it initially surprised that there were such possibilities in real science.

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
furthrmore your article acts as if we have not found tetra quarks. we have.

I don't know how you could misread the article that badly. The title of the article refers to "CERN's Discovery", what did you think it meant they discovered if not Tetraquarks?

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
furthrmore your article acts as if we have not found tetra quarks. we have.

I don't know how you could misread the article that badly. The title of the article refers to "CERN's Discovery", what did you think it meant they discovered if not Tetraquarks?

it's entirely possible. i am laboring under the effects of a abssessed tooth, a root canal, a temp filling and an inflamed jaw and ear at the moment. i hope i did not come off as being testy. i thought your article had said something on the order of "if a tetraquark is found...." if i didn't read that right i am sorry.

but all that aside it is a very interesting topic of discussion, yes? strange stars and matter, odd baryons and hadrons, dark matter, mirror matter, monopole matter and extra periodic tables with astonishing properties... it just don't get any better.


i dunno but i would guess that monopole elements would not be unstable. monopole uranium, plutonium, even ones that do not exist in nature in the normal periodic table. stable element 115 for example.

a reply to: stormbringer1701
Sorry to hear about your dental issues and yes that's enough to distract anybody. The closest thing to questioning the tetraquark I remember in the article is "If this discovery holds up", which needs to be said about the discovery of anything new in particle physics. We say that we've found the Higgs boson for example, but that discovery also needs to hold up, but saying that doesn't imply the discovery hasn't been made.

And yes it's a very interesting area of science, talking about forms of matter we didn't know about before. While tetraquarks can be created at CERN, neutron star conditions cannot, so we have to reply on making astronomical observations to determine if some of the neutron star variant hypotheses are correct or not. In short, I like the topic of your thread and find it fascinating, but I thought it relevant to note that "hypothesized to possibly exist" falls far short of "likely to exist", but I'm not trying to imply in any way that quark stars don't exist, just that there has been a lot of uncertainty about that, even after the confirmation of tetraquarks.

We do have some ideas on how we might observe quark stars, so now we must see what the future observations will reveal.

well "they" want to relook at the ligo data to see if they missed it (in addition to new runs of an upgraded ligo) but there is a new kid on the block now that should be able to detect higher frequency gravity waves. there is a desktop gravity wave detector on the horizon which should be able to detect gravity waves in the predicted range for this type of star.


speaking of odd forms of matter i forgot to mention kaonium and muonium and hybrid matter antimatter. each has potential to do something awesome.

muonium and kaonium are extremely short lived. but so is a naked neutron. but in an atom a neutron lasts forever. by itself it lasts about 11 minutes on average. so it is possible that something like kaonium or muonium might persist if they had lots of company or were chemically bonded. though with one orbital your chemistry would not be very complex. if kaonium and muonium cannot be stable perhaps some other non proton and non neutron particles would be.

and of course what one is looking for with hybrid atoms is a way to protect it from annihilation with matter so we can use the darned stuff safely.

a reply to: stormbringer1701
You speak of monopoles, but what are they? Do you mean magnetic monopoles? If yes, how can they create atoms?

originally posted by: wildespace
a reply to: stormbringer1701
You speak of monopoles, but what are they? Do you mean magnetic monopoles? If yes, how can they create atoms?

oh you asked a great question there. Scientists are pretty sure of one thing. at least one time at least one monopole existed. If it hadn't the universe as we know it simply would not exist. a monopole is exactly what Dirac needed in order to explain the quantiziation of the electric charge. with out it nothing would be possible.

other than that there are many theories about monopoles. so there are theoretically at least many species of monopole. at least 6 that i can think of.

a monopole atom is like a regular atom except different monopoles replace the proton and neutron and maybe electron. there are species of monopole that could in fact stand in for protons and neutrons in a nucleus. if this is reality instead of just theory you would have monopole atom based chemistry. there would be monopole doubles of every element in the periodic table.

because these monopoles are so tiny they are dwarfed by even the smallest regular atom. this means the length that the strong force has to go to keep the nucleons together is extremely short and therefor much stronger compared to the atomic forces holding a regular atom together. this means if you manage to split a monopole atom it liberates energy dwarfing your typical atomic fission or fusion event. additionally the "electron" shells are much shorter as well making the chemical bonding strength dwarf that of typical electronic bonds.

the upshot of this is that it is extremely hard to break either the chemical or atomic bonding of this material. it takes high energy gamma rays to even have a chance of knocking off the first level of ionization. the stuff is indestructible even in the most extreme of environments punishment and so forth.

additionally this stuff packs so close together that it is very dense. if you put a sufficient thickness of it inside it's shwartzchild radius you have a black hole. if i recall right for this stuff that would be a sphere about 3.25 CMs in diameter. that could be bad or it could be good. if you weren't planing on opening up a black hole that would be very bad. however if planned you could use it for a power supply or matter converter. besides you don't need a lot of this stuff to make super strong structures. molecular thicknesses will do.

this stuff would be strong enough to make a ring world encircling the entire solar system if you wanted a ring world that big.
on the other end of the size scale these atoms are so tiny you can make pico scale machines. forget about old fashioned nanoscale bots. pico scale bots can easily have full AI and complex tools and sensors.

at any rate there are types of monopole that would form ersatz atoms and perform ersatz chemistry.

the following may be a sci-Fi site but it is sci-fi that tries to be as true as possible to science. on the subject of monopoles in particular they cite and include in foot notes various real world peer reviewed papers on various species of monopole. so your explanation of how monopoles could form atoms is there and it's from science and not sci fi:

www.orionsarm.com...

and

www.orionsarm.com...

diracs monopole or monopoles is one type.

there are also theorized primordial frozen vaccuum defects left over from the inflationary stage of the universe.

there are also frozen string end monopoles

various supersymmetry derived monopoles

natural emergent monopoles. E.g.; a magnetic fluxline passing through a quantum wormhole would create a discrete opposing magnetic charge on each end of the wormhole.

manufactured emergent monopoles. E.g; frozen flux lines in superconductors and certain solid state condensed matter physics set ups. these have been seen in peer reviewed research. articles touting the "discovery of the monopole!" have been published in popular science media over the last few years.

various forms of unified field physics and susy theories require or allow monopoles.

of these species of monopole some annihilate with each other but other do not and these monopoles have integer or fractional charges of various types analogous to the the properties of regular nucleons that allow regular nucleons to form compoud multiparticle nuclei.

and it is that that could allow monopoles to make atoms.

a reply to: stormbringer1701
I appreciate your posts, but some links would be appreciated even more. How can I tell that you're not making this up? Could you please point me to some articles and papers about these monopoles and how they can form extra-strong matter?

Thanks.

a reply to: wildespace

though the links i provided for you were to orion's arm Sci fi site on monopoles they are well footnoted. meaning you can find papers on a lot of it from that. plus it provides a neat condensed summary on monopoles in actual science lit.

for example if you had read down to the development notes on the first page i linked to concerning monopoles you would find:

Initially published on 03 October 2005.

References
Highly recommended reading; this paper is aimed at the intellectually curious, and doesn't assume a background in theoretical physics:
hcs.harvard.edu...

Chapter 7 used extensively in the discussion of monopole cosmology:
"The Early Universe", Kolb & Turner, ISBN 0-201-62674-8

Discusses topological defects and the Kibble mechanism:
www.damtp.cam.ac.uk...

Discusses massless non-Abelian monopoles:
arxiv.org...
arxiv.org...

Discusses gravity waves from monopole-string systems:
arxiv.org...

Discusses monopole and domain wall formation in a "braneworld"
scenario:
arxiv.org...

addtionally:

meetings.aps.org...

A N-S monopole pair should form an atom, an analog of positronium. Such atoms might be created by colliding Pb beams at the LHC for which the available energy is 1144 TeV. The difficulty in understanding such systems can be seen by using the textbook positronium formula and Dirac's observation that the effective ``charge'' of a monopole (to use in Coulomb's law) is 67.5 n times the electron charge. Even with the integer n = 1, the energy radiated by a pair of poles as the atom cascades to the ground state is 147 times the rest energy of the pair, in violation of energy conservation. Relativistic corrections increase this value. Vacuum polarization effects give a large correction in the right direction, but the usual QED can not be used because the magnetic fine structure constant is huge, 137/4. Even without detailed calculations it can be assumed that the mass of the atom is much smaller than the mass of two free poles. As a newly produced pair begins to separate, one could expect additional poles to be produced from the vacuum resulting in two atoms moving away from each other. These atoms would self annihilate resulting in back to back jets.

that is an atom. so there at it's simplist is the evidence monopoles can form atoms. of course that is the simplist of atoms and not evidence for a second periodic table of different monopole atomic elements. but with the differing species of monopole with different charge numbers and spins you should be able to get more than two monopoles to bind into a nucleus.


Paul Dirac said if one monopole exists then the electric charge is quanticized. That would be quantum mechanics right there:

en.wikipedia.org...

The quantum theory of magnetic charge started with a paper by the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac in 1931.[10] In this paper, Dirac showed that if any magnetic monopoles exist in the universe, then all electric charge in the universe must be quantized.[11] The electric charge is, in fact, quantized, which is consistent with (but does not prove) the existence of monopoles.[11]

Paul Dirac, "Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field". Proc. Roy. Soc. (London) A 133, 60 (1931). Free web link.

users.physik.fu-berlin.de...

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
a reply to: wildespace
if you had read down to the development notes on the first page i linked to concerning monopoles you would find:

Initially published on 03 October 2005.

References
Highly recommended reading; this paper is aimed at the intellectually curious, and doesn't assume a background in theoretical physics:
hcs.harvard.edu...

I'm not sure your reading these sources any better than you read my source about the discovery of tetraquarks, when you missed that was the main point of the article.

Looking at your first source, it confirms that magnetic monopoles may not even exist, which of course is inferred when the paper states there is a POSSIBILITY they may exist (inferring of course there's a possibility they don't)

The ultimate goal is to make the abstract understandable to the general public, thus making clear the
possibility of the existence of magnetic monopoles....

Conclusion

...the present theory does not require magnetic monopoles to exist. Likewise, it does not forbid them to exist.

There may or may not be such a thing as magnetic monopoles. I see no reason for them to exist (or as your source put it, "the present theory does not require magnetic monopoles to exist.") I tend to doubt their existence but ultimately I could easily be convinced otherwise if and when they are ever discovered. It's not like we haven't looked for them:

Searches for magnetic monopoles

A number of attempts have been made to detect magnetic monopoles. One of the simpler ones is to use a loop of superconducting wire to look for even tiny magnetic sources, a so-called "superconducting quantum interference device", or SQUID. Given the predicted density, loops small enough to fit on a lab bench would expect to see about one monopole event per year. Although there have been tantalizing events recorded, in particular the event recorded by Blas Cabrera on the night of February 14, 1982 (thus, sometimes referred to as the "Valentine's Day Monopole"), there has never been reproducible evidence for the existence of magnetic monopoles. The lack of such events places a limit on the number of monopoles of about one monopole per 100000000000000000000000000000 nucleons.

Oh, I think I am. after all i pointed outthat there are multiple species of proposed monopole.

but to me if a monopole existing sometime in the cooling down period of the universe was necessary for quantisization to work that's good enough for me

besides i am sure you are aware that emergent behavioral monopoles have been spotted in spin ice and in other condense matter physics experiments. e.g; physicsworld.com...

physicsworld.com...

now these are not particles but an emergent property. but lets see another type of emergent monopole that could act as a point particle...

if you pass a magnetic flux line through a wormhole with some degree of separation between apertures then quantum back reaction generates a magnetic charge on each end of the wormhole and each charge is the opposite magnetic charge of the other. so your wormhole end would be a monopole.

as it happens various theories either call explicitly for a monopole to exist or are neutral to their existence.

and i take these suggestive things and believe that monopoles of the requisite type exist.

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
besides i am sure you are aware that emergent behavioral monopoles

Yes I'm aware of those but they aren't monopoles, they are quasiparticles. Electron holes are in the same class of quasiparticles, which behave like mobile positive charges, but there are no mobile positive charges accounting for electron hole behavior in semiconductors. Spin ice is interesting but I'm sure you realize the monopole-like behavior is not considered to be evidence for the existence of true monopoles in any way.

various theories either call explicitly for a monopole to exist or are neutral to their existence.

What about observation, and the failed searches for monopoles?

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: stormbringer1701
besides i am sure you are aware that emergent behavioral monopoles

Yes I'm aware of those but they aren't monopoles, they are quasiparticles. Electron holes are in the same class of quasiparticles, which behave like mobile positive charges, but there are no mobile positive charges accounting for electron hole behavior in semiconductors. Spin ice is interesting but I'm sure you realize the monopole-like behavior is not considered to be evidence for the existence of true monopoles in any way.

various theories either call explicitly for a monopole to exist or are neutral to their existence.

What about observation, and the failed searches for monopoles?

not evidence. many theoretical particles are not observable with current technology for a looong time. higgs is a good example. and gravitons are posited but it would take a detector with the mass of jupiter to find one graviton event in a million years. mirror matter is posited but impossible to detect directly and nearly impossible directly. those wierd baryons were hard to detect and were a long time undetected. gravity waves have not been detected. dark matter has not been observed.

so the absense of a monopole in a jar on a shelf somewhere does not dismay me.