I wish I could compress my quarks, maybe people would like me :p

just compress your feelings young one

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Compressed Quarks?

You sure it wasn't discs of vacuum dessicated Quark?

Just a wild guess here, but just imagine the original star was bigger than 1.17 sun masses originally, started to compress, and has shed an outer shell of matter during the process while the remaining 0.77 sun masses kept compressing down after having passed a certain threshold.

And a neutron star is not a black hole, so something could leave it, reducing it's mass over time. I'd guess this would be a super slow process, but nobody mentioned how old this thing is, anyway.

Nice, the amount of proteins that baby holds must be hyuge

[Just go to a German supermarket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product))

My quarks are just depressed 😔

Sooo - down quarks then? You need to hang out with some gluons...

That’s how I got here in the first place, man… sniffing gluons 😢

Go collect a couple of teaspoons of it et voila - reconstituted quarks for everyone!

Whilst some up quarks might help the situation, you might end up with a hadron & that's probably frowned on in public

The thing is, current theory says you can't have neutron stars below 1.4 solar masses. At lower masses you get a "white dwarf", which consists of a soup of atomic nucleii and electrons. Above the critical mass, the protons and electrons are compressed to neutrons, making a neutron star.

So the possibilities are our theory is wrong, our mass estimate is wrong, or it is an odd looking white dwarf and both theory and mass estimate are right.

If it's giving off light and heat then it's losing mass, just very slowly.

Just a sun made of self-sealing stem bolts.

Nothing to see here /s

Quarks have never been individually detected as the theory is that they are confined in groups of three. There are those who think that the Standard model is flawed. That's why Epismology, the study of the scientific method is so fascinating to me

"can't have" as in "A mass packed down to neutrons like a neutron star would expand and leave the neutron star phase if it dropped below the mass threshold"? My idea was that once it is packed down to neutrons, it will stay there, and not return to atoms with protons and electrons in the mix. So I thought that this could have happened just like with supernovas that shed an outer layer while the core keeps compressing.

I understand that from the plain mass aspect, you need more tha 1.4 sun masses to compress the nuclei+e soup down to neutrons. But in the end what you need is some energy to do his compression. It might come from mass, it might come from a solar collision, or, what I suggested, that the original mass was sufficiently critical to compress the core down to neutrons, but during this process something happened (radiation energy coming from the collaps of the core?) that blew the not-yet-converted-to-neutron outer parts away. Of course, this idea can only work if a neutron star will stay a neutron star once converted.

I read a separate article stating that it's theorized that this star may be comprised of a high level (roughly 1/3 mass) of strange quarks, formed when the much lighter up & down quarks of its constituent nuclei fuse. This is just a theory; this hasn't been observed in any way.

If that is the case, though, I'm not sure how the mechanics of that work. It seems to me that you have to overcome the Pauli exclusion pressure to push two fundamental particles together. But I think this is possible given asymptotic freedom? I guess if it's going to happen anywhere, it would be a neutron(-like) star.

Wow. This ball gets stranger and stranger...

> But in the end what you need is some energy to do his compression.

Gravity is what is doing the compression. The self-gravity of all the material squeezes the center into neutronium (a solid mass of neutrons).

Let's break this down, as far as we know the only way to get a neutron star is when the core of a very massive star collapses when it dies. The inner core is crushed to super high density electron degeneracy conditions (white dwarf star matter) and then a core of that matter builds up that is too heavy to resist further collapse, and then a neutron star forms. This would naturally lead to a minimum mass for neutron stars, at about 1.44 solar masses, which seems to be born out by observations, so far. This object appears to be a neutron star density but only 0.7 solar masses, which would put it more in the realm of what should just be a white dwarf.

One other issue is that neutron star material is not necessarily stable under less pressure, and would simply decay into atomic matter.

This raises the question of how this object got from point A (the core of some dying star, most likely) to B (a sub-stellar mass neutron star), and there are lots of possibilities. The possibility being floated here is that the object is not a neutron star per se but rather a "quark star" or a "strange star" where instead of being made up of mostly neutrons it's actually made up of an arrangement of quarks with a mixture of strange quarks in a configuration that allows it to be stable in that mass range. It's been proposed that it may be possible for "strange quark matter" to exist in forms which would basically catalyze the conversion of neutron star material into it at similar densities to neutron stars. It may be that this is an example of a fragment of a neutron star that underwent a conversion to a quark star and then lost some of its mass in some way, or it might be a more direct conversion of a white dwarf into a quark star. There are a zillion questions still to be answered and this is an intriguing piece of evidence, assuming it holds up to scrutiny.

“degeneracy pressure” is a term to look up if you find all this interesting. There are a few types.