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 ...

Dark star crashes: the computer simulation of two merging neutron stars (left) blended with an image of heavy-ion collisions at CERN to highlight the connection of astrophysics with nuclear physics.

Scientists are dreaming up ways to probe the nature of the Universe’s smallest bits—quarks—by observing ultra-dense neutron stars slamming into each other. Particle colliders in Switzerland and on ...

Neutron stars are so named because in the simplest of models they are made of neutrons. They form when the core of a large star collapses, and the weight of gravity causes atoms to collapse. Electrons ...

In this video, we dive into the terrifying physics of neutron stars, where a single teaspoon of material weighs one billion ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

The lightest neutron star so far found is located at the center of the supernova remnant HESS J1731-347. Dr. Victor Doroshenko, Dr. Valery Suleimanov, Dr. Gerd Pühlhofer and Professor Andrea ...

According to modern particle physics, matter produced when neutron stars merge is so dense that it could exist in a state of dissolved elementary particles. This state of matter, called quark-gluon ...