What happens when foreign matter enters Earth's atmosphere?

In theory, foreign matter is produced after a star dies. So what happens when a star dies?

The answer depends entirely on the mass of the star. Over time, every star including the Sun will gradually cool down and eventually become a white dwarf. However, some stars have more dramatic deaths, collapsing rapidly due to low pressure inside the star's core, then causing cosmic-level explosions, or supernovas. .

Our sun is about 330,000 times larger than Earth. (Illustration).

Supernovas are also responsible for creating black holes that spread across the galaxy, but the prerequisite is that the stars before exploding must have a mass three times the mass of the Sun. For ease of visualization, our Sun is about 330,000 times larger than Earth.

The burning of nuclei in a star's core keeps gravity from compressing mass back in. As a star's hydrogen supply is used up, nuclear combustion gradually becomes unsustainable. At this point, the gravitational collapse phase occurs when the pressure inside the object is no longer strong enough to counteract its own gravitational pull, eventually potentially turning the rest of the star's core into a black hole.

A second possibility is that if the core is hard enough to withstand gravity, the remaining electrons and protons will superconnect into neutrons, creating a neutron star. Unlike black holes where light cannot escape, neutron stars are still visible to the naked eye. But on the other hand, the subatomic quarks inside the neutron star - which keep everything together - can go out of control, eventually causing a phenomenon that goes against the conventional laws of nuclear physics. often.

Most subatomic particles (components of atomic particles) are made up of a tight combination of three elementary quarks (2 up and 1 down), aka hadrons. In most cases quarks tend to be inseparable, but this cannot be guaranteed inside a neutron star, where quarks that are so tightly squeezed can exist in 'soup' form - The structure allows the up and down quarks to move freely.

In 2004, a team of researchers at Cornell University hypothesized that the conditions inside a neutron star could produce a hyperon, a type of particle composed of strange quarks - the kind of atomically perfect quarks. so that it easily converts ordinary quarks into strange quarks, which in turn leads to strange matter.

A neutron star that successfully transforms itself into strange matter is called a strange quark star.

Foreign matter is not only capable of absorbing any particles it comes in contact with, pulling more quarks into the quark "soup", but can also escape out of the neutron star's core, leaving it intact. According to the researchers, it has the ability to turn entire stars and planets into strange matter, thereby creating 'strange' planets and white dwarfs. A neutron star that successfully transforms itself into strange matter is called a strange quark star.

In 2019, Cornell University said that the primary scattering of strange matter from a strange quark star in the form of fragmented rings can occur during collisions between one or more quark stars. As a result of scattering, there will be many stranglet particles (also known as annihilation particles) born, and drifting through the universe. The stranglets can transform the nucleus of any atom into a child stranglet when touched. And so the stranglets are like a virus that eats away at all other atoms, turning everything into stranglets and creating a chain reaction, until nothing remains but these stranglets.

The team hypothesizes that as soon as a strangelet enters Earth's atmosphere, the strange nature of its atomic composition will turn everything on Earth into foreign matter. If you haven't already figured it out, this process instantly kills all life on the blue planet.

But don't worry, the journal Nature published a report in 2017 showing that strangelets could be as theoretical as dark matter, which is speculated to be the fundamental component that makes up 70% of matter. dark matter + ordinary matter) in the universe. If strange matter is indeed constantly circling the universe, surely the number of strange planets and strange stars must increase greatly because of its 'corrosive' nature. But currently, science has not discovered an alarming number, so it seems that humanity will remain peaceful for a long time.