Forming Strange Quarks in Strange Stars

[LachyP]

I have done large amounts of research and could not find any books, sites or forums of how the strange matter in strange stars is formed. I know that the process of the formation of the strange star carries out mostly like the collapse into neutron stars and quark stars but how do these strange quarks formed in the collapsing core? I really need an answer to complete my research..

 

[russ_watters]

You need to give us more than that for us to help you: where are you reading about "strange matter"? Please provide references. Needless to say it seems odd that you say you can't find books, sites or forums discussing it, yet obviously you are asking about it here because you heard of it *somewhere*. So where did you hear about it?

 

[LachyP]

You need to give us more than that for us to help you: where are you reading about "strange matter"? Please provide references. Needless to say it seems odd that you say you can't find books, sites or forums discussing it, yet obviously you are asking about it here because you heard of it *somewhere*. So where did you hear about it?

I was discussion stars with a friend of mine when he mentioned strange stars. I had no idea what is was so when I got home later that day I researched it. At that time I thought he simply meant stars that were 'strange', but once I had researched I found that they were a certain type of dense star consisting of strange quarks. At this early point in time, I hadn't any knowledge of quarks, so I researched more. Afterwards I learned loads and loads of new things about quarks from various websites and a few articles. Despite all of my countless searching, I had not managed to find any information at all of how the strange quarks and matter had formed in the core. Make sense now?

 

[Nugatory]

but once I had researched I found that they were ...

But where did you find this? Wikipedia? Arxiv? Some website somewhere? Can you provide links?

 

[LachyP]

But where did you find this? Wikipedia? Arxiv? Some website somewhere? Can you provide links?

I found some quick information here http://www.universetoday.com/70111/astronomy-without-a-telescope-strange-stars/ , another tiny amount here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_star and a few others that didn't really give me much information. These are my sources but yet neither of them goes into detail of as to how these strange quarks had come about. That is why I wrote this thread..

 

[stevebd1]

You might find the following of interest-

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sb/Nov-2004/03-neutron-stars.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.2708v2
Neutron Star Interiors and the Equation of State of Superdense Matter

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0407155
Strange Quark Matter and Compact Stars

 

[lpetrich]

As to how the strange quarks form, it's by the weak interaction:

u -> s + (W)
(W) + d -> u or (W) -> e + nu

where (W) is a virtual W.

Neutron star: interior is mostly neutrons
Quark star: some of the interior becomes a quark-gluon soup or quark matter
Strange star: some of the quark-gluon soup has some of its down quarks turned into strange quarks

However, all three kinds of star look very similar from the outside, so finding observable distinctions between them is a challenge.