2010/05/24 by J. E. Horvath, Horvath, J. E.
Chemistry · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Aerospace engineering #Chemistry #Cold Fusion and Nuclear Reactions #Combustion #Condensed matter physics #Engineering #Environmental science #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Mechanics #Nuclear engineering #Physical chemistry #Physics #State of matter #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1005.4302
6 pages, 1 figure
arxiv created 2010/05/24 · openalex publication_date 2010/05/24 · arxiv updated 2010/05/25 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A variety of descriptions of the conversion of a neutron into a strange star have appeared in the literature over the years. Generally speaking, these works treat the process as a mere phase transition or ignore everything but microscopic kinetics, attempting to pin down the speed of the conversion and its consequences. We revisit in this work the propagation of the hypothetical "combustion" n → SQM in a dense stellar environment. We address in detail the instabilities affecting the flame and present new results of application to the turbulent regime. The acceleration of the flame, the possible transition to the distributed regime and further deflagration-to-detonation mechanism are addressed. As a general result, we conclude that the burning happens in (at least) either the turbulent Rayleigh-Taylor or the distributed regime. In both cases the velocity of the conversion of the star is several orders of magnitude larger than vlam, making the latter irrelevant in practice for this problem. A transition to a detonation is by no means excluded, actually it seems to be favored by the physical setting, but a definitive answer would need a full numerical simulation.