Quark Stars?

An artist’s rendering of a super-luminous stellar explosion that created what some researchers believe may be a quark star.  The observation was recently made from the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory. This explosion, and two others like it over the past three years, mystified scientists because they were 100 times brighter than any other supernova explosion. A neutron star is formed following the death of a normal star that experiences a supernova. A new theory suggests that if a neutron star is so dense that it explodes, what is left behind is an ultra-dense star composed of tightly packed subatomic particles called quarks. The Palomar Observatory is located in San Diego County, Calif., and managed by the California Institute of Technology and is linked to the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) research network funded by the National Science Foundation.

Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss