Strange Matter

This is yet another threat to Earth, one that I had not considered. This is just a theory connected to neutron stars, but it could be one of the greatest threats to life even imagined.

Recently, an immensely powerful burst of gamma ray radiation was thought to have been caused by the collision of two neutron stars approximately 600 light years away. A neutron star is formed when a giant red star goes supernova and explodes resulting in a nebula and a core that has collapsed into a neutron star. Neutron stars are composed of compacted neutrons. Think of a star the size of our sun or even two to three times its size compacted down to the size of Manhattan. The density, gravity and magnetic field would be off the charts. A small thimble sized amount of neutron star would literally fall through the Earth. Now, think of what would happen if two of these monsters collided. The amount of energy released would be way off the charts.

It turns out that scientists believe that strange matter exists in the cores of neutron stars because of the massive amount of pressure and heat there. Normal matter consists of protons and neutrons, which are built up form up and down quarks. Strange matter is composed of up, down and strange quarks. This form of strange (quark) matter is called stranglets.

The problem with stranglets is that when they interact with normal matter they covert it to strange matter. In other words, it's a lot like the 'blob' in the movie of the same name. Everything the blob absorbs is converted to blob material.
It could be that when two neutron stars containing strange matter collide, they cause a violent explosion that blasts stragelets out into space, perhaps at the speed of light. If these strangelets were to hit the Earth's atmosphere, they would convert the air molecules into strange matter and this would cause a nuclear conversion of all of Earth's matter into strange matter, which would cause the Earth to explode.

There is one flaw with this theory, and that is that strange matter is only stable at high pressures, the kind of pressure that exists in the core of neutron stars. There is the possibility that normal matter could be metastable and decay into strange matter, but this decay would have a long lifetime, perhaps taking million of years.

My take on this is that strange matter is not very well understood and needs more research to form a solid idea of what it is. In other words, all of this is very strange.

Thanks for reading.