Pion stars might look deceptively like ordinary ones ESO/G. Beccari
Exotic star-like objects made up almost entirely of subatomic particles called pions could have formed in the earliest fractions of a second after the big bang. If proven to exist, these cosmic oddballs would be one of the strangest additions to the stellar catalogue.
Pions are lightweight particles formed from just two quarks, as opposed to more familiar matter like protons and neutrons, which each contain three quarks. The universe was suffused with a primordial pion soup one-ten-thousandth of a second after the big bang, and this soup was studded…
