What is a Strangelet?
A strangelet isn’t real. There are some theories that suggest that matter composed of strange quarks could remain stable outside of conditions in which might form and perhaps be a constituent of “dark matter” the mysterious invisible substance which provides the extra gravity that seems to keep galaxies rotating at the speed they do. However, the evidence for these “stranglets” is patchy at best, and there are much better explanations at present. Normally particles containing strange quarks decay into ordinary matter in very short order. But then, the truth is stranger than fiction…
Strangelets are theorized cosmological objects composed of an exotic form of matter known as strange matter or quark matter. This form of matter is created in the cores of particularly massively neutron stars. In neutron stars, the remnants of collapsed stars with masses between 4 and 8 times that of our sun, pressure and temperature is so intense that the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons. The resultant matter is sometimes referred to as neutronium, a sea of neutrons packed far more densely than conventional matter. Sometimes the pressure and gravity in the centres of neutron stars is so massive that the neutronium collapses into its constituent particles, quarks. This results in agglomerations of so-called strange quarks bound to each other directly much in the same manner that the transition from conventional star to neutron star results in seas of neutrons bound directly together. The names physicists have given this type of matter are “quark matter” or
The strangelet is a recently hypothesized form of matter, given a great deal of attention with the recent activation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven. It is a form of quark matter: a substance formed when present energy is sufficient to allow quarks and gluons to overcome the strong nuclear force and become uniform matter. This, under normal circumstances, would only be possible in a neutron star. However, with the creation of the RHIC and 2008 initiation of the Large Hadron Collider, situations are present in which the absurd temperatures (10^13 kelvins) necessary can occur. The strangelet itself is a possibility of quark matter which occurs when an up quark and down quark combine to form a strange quark, one that does not exist under normal conditions. If a large number of these transformations occured at the same time, a strangelet could be formed: quark matter consisting entirely of strange quarks. Now, strangelets are more interesting than the usual anomalous m
