Strangelets
Is there "strange quark matter" in cosmic rays? On Earth, we can't really do experiments on how matter behaves at the density found in a neutron star. We can look at the density of, e.g., a gold nucleus - a pretty dense bit of stuff, by human standards, weighing 100 million tons per cm^3 - but maybe squeezing it really hard would make it denser. One theory, in particular, suggests that nuclear matter, when squeezed, could turn into "strange matter". The word "strange", in this context, means that the matter contains so-called "strange quarks". A small ball of this "strange matter" would behave a lot like a regular nucleus, except with more mass and less charge. Such a ball, called a strangelet, might be found among the ordinary nuclei in high-energy cosmic rays!
Unlike ordinary nuclei, which are only stable up to a mass of 250 amu or so, a ball of strange matter could be stable at any size. It could be the size of a baseball and weigh as much as Mt. Everest. It could be the size of the Matterhorn and weigh as much as the Sun. (Of course, nothing this large will pass through the AMS detector!) AMS will look for objects weighing 10-100 times as much as a carbon nucleus, carrying less than 1/2 or 1/3 of the expected charge.
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