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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have discovered the lightest Neutron star ever, a small, extremely dense stellar object that might also confirm the existence of a very strange state of matter. Neutron stars are one of the ...

Some neutron stars probably have something strange lurking in their cores, according to a recent study. Neutron stars are already some of the most peculiar objects in the universe. They contain enough ...

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 ...

An experiment more than 10 years in the making has delivered its first glimpse of the hurricane of particles whirring inside subatomic particles called neutrons, laying the groundwork to solve a ...

Some neutron stars may contain a "special type of matter," according to a new NASA study. These observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory indicate that the interiors of neutron stars might ...

When certain large stars use up all their nuclear fuel and die, they collapse and detonate, creating a supernova. These end-of-life events are some of the most energetic in the universe, and send ...

MIT physicists now have an answer to a question in nuclear physics that has puzzled scientists for three decades: Why do quarks move more slowly inside larger atoms? Quarks, along with gluons, are the ...

A proton isn't just three quarks and gluons, but a sea of dense particles and antiparticles inside. The more precisely we look at a proton and the greater the energies that we perform deep inelastic ...