, they leave behind neutron stars. These incredibly dense objects are only a few miles across but can weigh a few times the mass of the sun. As their name suggests, they are made almost entirely of pure neutrons, making them essentially kilometers-wide atomic nuclei.are so exotic that physicists do not yet fully understand them.
There are six kinds, or"flavors," of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. A neutron is composed of two down quarks and one up quark. If you squish too many atoms together, they revert to a giant ball of neutrons. So, if you squish too many neutrons together, do they revert to a giant ball of quarks?The answers vary from"maybe" to"it's complicated." The problem is that quarks really do not enjoy being alone.
If you were to fashion a macroscopic object out of the up or down quarks that make up a neutron, that object would explode very quickly and very violently. But there might be a path using strange quarks. By themselves, strange quarks are pretty heavy, and when they're left alone, they rapidly decay into the lighter up and down quarks. When large numbers of quarks group together, however, the physics may change. Physicists have found that strange quarks can bind with up and down quarks to form triplets, known as"strangelets," that might be stable — but only under extreme pressures. Like the pressures one step above a neutron star.
Interesting