{"id":148800,"date":"2022-10-24T18:22:47","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T23:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/astronomers-find-a-potential-quark-star-that-defies-conventional-physics"},"modified":"2022-10-24T18:22:47","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T23:22:47","slug":"astronomers-find-a-potential-quark-star-that-defies-conventional-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/astronomers-find-a-potential-quark-star-that-defies-conventional-physics","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers find a potential \u201cquark star\u201d that defies conventional physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-find-a-potential-quark-star-that-defies-conventional-physics2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Quarks all the way down.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/science\/the-webb-space-telescope-has-found-its-first-supernova\">collapse and explosion of a supergiant<\/a> is now roughly 77 percent the mass of our Sun, packed into a sphere about 10 kilometers wide. That\u2019s a mind-bogglingly dense ball of matter \u2014 it\u2019s squished together so tightly that it doesn\u2019t even have room to be atoms, just neutrons. But as neutron stars go, it\u2019s weirdly lightweight. Figuring out why that\u2019s the case could reveal fascinating new details about exactly what happens when massive stars collapse and explode.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s New \u2014 When a massive star collapses, it triggers an explosion that blasts most of the star\u2019s outer layers out into space, where they form an ever-widening cloud of hot, glowing gas. The heart of the star, however, gets squashed together in the final pressure of that collapse and becomes a neutron star. Normally, what\u2019s left behind is something between 1.17 and 2.35 times as massive as the Sun, crammed into a ball a few dozen kilometers wide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quarks all the way down. Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind by the collapse and explosion of a supergiant is now roughly 77 percent the mass of our Sun, packed into a sphere about 10 kilometers wide. That\u2019s a mind-bogglingly dense ball of matter \u2014 it\u2019s squished together so tightly that it [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}