Could preon stars reveal a hidden reality? (original) (raw)

WHAT would happen if you took the Earth and compressed it down to the size of a tennis ball? No one is saying this is imminent, but the thought experiment leads to an intriguing possibility. If you could squash the Earth down to this size, it would become far denser than any substance found in nature. You’d think it would be well on its way to becoming a black hole. Yet there is a slight chance that you’d get something completely different: a preon star.

Preons are hypothetical particles that have been proposed as the building blocks of quarks, which are in turn the building blocks of protons and neutrons. A preon star – which is not really a star at all – would be a chunk of matter made of these constituents of quarks and bound together by gravity. According to physicists Johan Hansson and Fredrik Sandin of the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, swarms of preon stars may have formed in the early universe, and might even still be around. If so, they would be strong contenders to be the weirdest stuff in the cosmos.

It’s a highly speculative idea, but it’s also a concrete attempt to shake up physics as we know it. The same questions keep cropping up. Will we find a theory of everything? Does dark matter exist, and if so, what is it? These are big gaps in our knowledge. Physicists keep coming up with ideas to try to fill these gaps, and Hansson and Sandin are doing their bit. So far they have published two papers to back up the preon star concept, and have suggested experiments with which to test it.…