Atoms are made of three things: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Electrons are a type of fundamental particle, but protons and neutrons are composite particles made of up and down quarks. Protons ...

Neutron stars were once thought to be the densest objects nature could create—but some physicists believe there’s a step ...

Raimond Snellings studies quarks, one of the smallest building blocks of matter. For reasons that physicists don’t fully understand, quarks exist in our universe mainly in groups of threes, to form, ...

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs ...

Quark matter may join solid, liquids, gases, and plasmas as a newly-understood state of matter. Far from being exotic, a new study suggests that quark matter could make up a large percentage of the ...

Core mystery: The different layers of matter in a neutron star. (Courtesy: Jyrki Hokkanen, CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd, Finland) A long-standing debate about what lies at the heart of neutron ...

Ground-based radio telescopes, gravitational wave detectors, and a space-based X-ray telescope (right) all measure neutron stars (top left, shown merging), lending insight into the pairing of ...

In the middle of the glowing gas cloud of a supernova remnant, about 8,000 light years away, sits the crushed heart of a dead star. Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind ...

A neutron star is so dense that one sugar cube of its material would weigh around 1 trillion kilograms.