A new study by scientists from Brazil suggests that for the first time it was possible to detect a hypothetical “strange star”. It belongs to the class of quark stars and has never been found yet. Some scientists generally believe that they cannot exist, writes ScienceAlert.
Scientists from the University of São Paulo continued to study an unusual object, which was studied by astronomers from Germany last year. As Focus already wrote, then scientists announced that they had discovered an unusual neutron star at the center of a supernova remnant called HESS J1731-347.
A new study suggests that this neutron star may actually be the first discovered member of a hypothetical class of stars called quark stars.
This incredibly compact star, which does not exceed the size of a sphere with a diameter of 10 km, has the smallest mass of any known neutron star. As shown by a previous study, a star located at a distance of 8150 light-years from us has a mass that is equivalent to 77% of the mass of the Sun.
But this is very surprising, because astronomers believe that neutron stars can have the smallest mass, which is equivalent to 1.17 solar masses. That is, in any case, it is a very strange object and neutron stars cannot have such a small mass.
Neutron stars are very dense remnants of dead large stars that have an incredibly high density and very small size. These stars are made up of neutrons, hence their name.
According to the authors of the new study, the star that is in the supernova remnant HESS J1731-347 may not be a neutron star at all, but consist of particles such as quarks and, accordingly, it is a quark star.
Astronomers now speculate that this type of “strange star” may exist in space, although they have never been found. Some scientists generally believe that such stars do not exist. But Brazilian researchers suggest that the unusual compact object has all the hallmarks of a quark star and may be one.
Quarks are the fundamental particles that make up protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms. Some scientists believe that under the influence of enormous pressure, quarks can form a new form of matter – quark matter.
So far, scientists do not know how this very dense object, which theoretically consists mainly of quarks, could have appeared as a result of a supernova explosion. Scientists x have some assumptions that they want to test.
At the same time, Brazilian astronomers say it is too early to say that they have indeed discovered the first quark star. So far, everything points to this fact, but additional observations of the strange object are needed.
