Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

Hey #physicists. Could there be a kind of quark matter (maybe with top quarks) that was so dense a lump of it could fit inside its own Schwartzschild radius?

If so, from outside the event horizon, how would that even in principle be distinguishable from a black hole with a singularity inside?

Apr 15 at 9:34amWeb
Show threadjan Ki | 奇  Apr 15
@petealexharris
Stephen Hawking (a visitor to Epstein island) speculated about micro black holes with a mass > 10⁻⁸ kg. A top quark for comparison has a mass of roughly 3×10⁻²⁵ kg. The discussion mostly revolved around fermions and whether general relativity remains valid at such small scales.
Einstein-Cartan theory, which takes spin into account, comes to a minimum mass of ~10¹⁶ kg.
Show threadjan Ki | 奇  Apr 15

@petealexharris
Generally speaking, you can't just apply macroscopic general relativity to the standard model due to the Planck limit.

What's more, quarks don't just exist on their own, they're exchange particles modelling the strong nuclear force. So, on a macroscopic level, you'd just have protons, neutrons or their heavier counterparts.

Show threadPete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫Apr 15
@ki
Yeah. I assume it'd be a ball of the heavier counterparts of neutrons, like an extra-dense neutron star. My maths isn't anywhere near good enough to work out what the radius of say 3 solar masses of neutron star material would be if gravity crushed the neutrons enough to make "top-quark matter" a more favourable state. Do you just shrink the volume linearly by the ratio of mass of a neutron to the fancy particle? Probably not?
Show threadjan Ki | 奇  Apr 15

@petealexharris
we don't even know the mass of such baryons yet, so it's difficult to give a satisfying answer. Also, I specialized in photonics, so my astronomy isn't the greatest :D

to form a black hole, you need to squish matter together so that the object's radius is smaller than its Schwarzschild radius. A higher mass would mean you need less average density.
Even with ordinary matter, this question becomes complicated really quickly.