Strange matter, composed of quarks, can form in the cores of neutron stars. Strangelets, clumps of strange matter, may exist and could be a possible explanation for dark matter. If they come into contact with ordinary matter, they could break it apart and turn it into strange matter. The existence of strangelets has not been conclusively proven, but their potential impact on the universe is significant.
Stranges are theorized cosmological objects composed of an exotic form of matter known as strange matter or quark matter. This form of matter is created in the cores of particularly massive neutron stars. In neutron stars, the remnants of collapsed stars with masses between 4 and 8 times that of our sun, the pressure and temperature are so intense that the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons. The resulting matter is sometimes called neutronium, a sea of neutrons packed much more densely than conventional matter.
Sometimes the pressure and gravity at the centers of neutron stars are so massive that the neutronium collapses into its constituent particles, the quarks. This results in agglomerations of so-called strange quarks directly bonded to each other in the same way that the transition from a conventional star to a neutron star results in seas of neutrons directly bonded together. The names that physicists have given to this type of matter are “quark matter” or “strange matter”. This can be thought of as a phase change, like going from a liquid to a solid, only at densities many orders of magnitude greater than those occurring in this solar system.
It has been hypothesized that strangelets (substellar clumps of strange matter) may exist independently of the quark stars that created them. If so, there could be a lot of weirdness in this universe, one possible explanation for the dark matter problem. Because Strangelets maintain such deep gravity wells for objects of their size, calculations show that Strangelets contacting ordinary matter would engulf this matter with their gravitational fields, breaking ordinary matter apart into strange matter. If strangelets exist and continue to contact ordinary matter indefinitely, it may only be a matter of time (albeit a cosmologically long duration) before strangelets gobble up all conventional matter in the universe.
While the existence of strangelets has not yet been conclusively demonstrated, there are observed stars that are too dense to be conventional neutron stars, but too sparse to be black holes (i.e., have volume). Additionally, strangelets have been blamed for unexplained seismic events. If a small strangelet penetrated the Earth at relativistic speeds, it would indeed perturb ordinary matter, although how far exactly hasn’t yet been established in a consensus among the physics community. Similar to the neutrino before its discovery in 1956, the strangelet remains a theoretical construct until we develop instruments fine enough to verify or disprove their existence.
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