PHYSICISTS have been struggling for years to create an ultra-dense material called quark matter by smashing particles together at high energies. But there might be an easier way to find the stuff. It seems that massive balls of quark matter exist in space.
Astronomers using the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory stumbled across the discovery while looking at the debris from recent supernovae, the titanic explosions that happen when stars run out of fuel. In a supernova, a star’s core is thought to collapse so rapidly that atomic nuclei are squashed into a soup of neutrons. The process compresses material weighing…
